Tuesday, December 23, 2008

About NW Ohio Live Services: "Live Camera"

This is the third entry of a series of seven blog entries that will provide additional details surrounding all the elements at NW Ohio Live Services (http://nwohio-liveservices.dyndns.org/).

Today's topic is the "Live Camera" component (http://nwohio-liveservices.dyndns.org/livecamera.html). The goal of this camera is to provide a window on the local weather activity.

The Live Camera is powered by a generic stand alone web camera. This web camera FTPs an image every minute to my Web Server. That image is then also FTP'd to Weather Uunderground for further visibility and achieving (http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KOHOREGO2).

One neat feature on Weather Underground is the ability to recall a 24 hour time lapse video loop of all captured images from any day in the past (http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/kc8nno/1/show.html). I've had some fun going back and watching time lapse video of the days during which we had recent snow falls.

I am also impressed at how well the camera works at nights during which there is a decent blanketing of snow present. In some cases, almost as bright as day time, but other days with less or no snow, not much can be seen. I also have a window screen that is impairing the best possible visibilty of the outside--I'm looking into removing that screen at some point in the future.

As a final note, I'm also submitting these Live Camera images to The Weather Channel via their Weather Bonk site (http://www.weatherbonk.com/weather/camDetail.jsp?id=cam_1229899380150).

This concludes the in depth look at the details surrounding the Live Camera element. Stay tuned for the next topic which will cover the Live Mapping component in more detail.

(About NW Ohio Live Services - Blog Entry 3 of 7)

2008 NW Ohio Live Services

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