Setting up your Website and Webcam

Can somebody please point me towards instructions for setting up my webcam with WD. I have the webcam installed and working (it works with Cheese anyway). I would like to be able to upload the images to WU along with my normal daily data.

Thanks in advance.

See if this FAQ helps: http://discourse.weather-watch.com/t/12307

If the cam insists on sending numbered images that does cause problems. Is the cam on the same computer running WD? Will the cam save files locally without ftp’ing them to the server?

Is your intention to have WD annotate and upload the image? If the .jpg’s are deleted does guvcview start over at 1 again? If so then you should be able to make it work with the linux equivalent of a batch file that’s scheduled to delete the file after WD has uploaded it.

Ok, do you want to try and get it working with WD, or, do you want to find a way to deal with the numbered images?

there is no WD web camcapture for linux

so you do need to use a 3rd party web cam capture software program

but if that is not producing a static file name then its not that easy to use that image in WD

I don’t think deleting the file is so bad, it’s a work around for a “feature” that the author of guvcview thought would be valuable. What cam do you have?

I found reference to uvccapture http://www.quickcamteam.net/software/linux/v4l2-software/uvccapture that apparently overwrites the captured image.

Not at all, it was a fair comment. Just so happens I don’t use WD’s functions for my webcam, you probably would find my (windows) scripted solution very inelegant too, but it’s worked troublefree for years…

Sounds good to me :slight_smile: If you want to add weather data on the website pic you can use the 642weather.com php script.

It’s to be found here: http://www.642weather.com/weather/scripts-image-handler.php the author, Mike Challis, has good documentation, it installs/runs on your webserver. It gets the weather data from a file uploaded by WD (I believe the linux version will do that part).

Not sure of the context but on here it normally means a movie generated from multiple snapshot images, IOW a time lapse, nice to show development of storms, dawn, sunset etc. Scroll to the bottom of the author’s page for examples http://www.weather-display.com/windy/gb/grahamsbeach.htm.

its not all that clear exactly what you are trying to do?
if you are simply wanting to upload a web cam image file to your web site
then use the
control panel, ftp/internet setup, web cam
select the file
click add to add to the list
then tick upload these files as well
set the times to upload
and turn the switch on

I just tested that here, and it works

I sent you my latest answers. Are you going to move those messages out here?

Randy

BTW, I tried putting a sticker in my signature, but it’s not coming through. I really want something like Brian has. Do you know how I create one of those?

Randy

Here’s the code for mine, just substitute your url and image url:

[url=http://www.realweatherstation.com]
[img]http://www.realweatherstation.com/wxs/sticker.php?type=banner[/img]
[/url]

Got it! Thanks.

Randy

Setting up your own weather website using WD for Linux.

Warning: WD is a very powerful piece of software and can do almost anything you want it to do. However, in my opinion, it is haphazardly organised (not a criticism, just an observation) and poorly documented (this has traditionally been one of the downsides of Linux projects). This means that if you are a beginner or an intermediate in Linux, you are likely to spend a helluva lot of time just finding out how things are supposed to work - at least that was my experience. This tutorial is my attempt to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Here are the things I wish I knew before I started the project.

a) WD is powerful and can do what you want…if you can find out how.
b) There are far fewer commenters on these forums than you would hope - so help is not always at hand.
c) You need to set up a static file somewhere called something like image.jpg. This will be a static file and to this name, you will post your webcam shots. This static file will then be uploaded on a regular basis (set by you) to your website and to WeatherUnderground (if you so wish). You will have to point WD and WU at this file.
d) There does not seem to be a program in Linux which can take webcam pictures at regular intervals and post them to a static file name. Work arounds are required.
e) Whatever solution you come up with, it will not be elegant. HT niko :slight_smile:

  1. Get yourself a website e.g www.xxxweatherxxx.xxx
  2. You can get this from GoDaddy. I have stolen the following from various posts by niko.

Following (and stealing from Bob), Creating a basic web page FAQ

Where Bob’s FTP/Internet set up is for Windows…the attached is mine for Linux.

Follow Bob’s instructions and fill out this page. Note there are duplicate numbers on Bob’s page…focus on the blue numbers that have arrows attached…ignore the ones with no arrows.

My generation time window is shown attached…again follow Bob’s lead…but ignore again the blue numbers with no arrows.

Now you will be taken to 3 web page set up forms. As each of these posts has a maximum of only 4 attachments, I will to the next post to show my 3 forms.


Ooops! for some reason my internet set up page was not loaded above. Here it is now.