If you have an old android phone lying around, you may have a webcam ready to setup. There is an app called Android webcam server, which will turn your old phone into a webcam. The quality is pretty good too.
That’s a very nice picture. Just got my first smart phone yesterday so it will be awhile until I can experiment.
Thanks for sharing. - Jim
yes, the quality of the cameras on smart phones is getting better and better
This is the situation I am in right now. I just replaced my two year old HTC Hero with a shiny new Samsung Galaxy SII, and for the past month I’ve been looking at the HTC and thinking there must be a way to get this to work as a weather camera. Your post pointed me in the right direction, thanks. The app is actually called “IP Webcam”, and is available on the Android Market.
Once installed it is incredibly simple to use. The URL to provide to the WD webcam utility on the IP Camera Setup page is http://192.168.2.84:8080/shot.jpg ← Your IP will differ and you can set the port to something else if you wish. I have set up WD to overlay some text and weather info, and it is successfully doing ten minute uploads of the view across my untidy desk! I haven’t found anywhere (or any way!) to mount the phone properly yet. Job for the weekend I think.
I have the quality set to (the default) 50% using a 640x480px image and the resulting jpg is 32kb, so there is room to up the quality a bit there.
Overall, very happy!
I taped mine to the window. Crud but it works.
Unfortunately, my droid has suddenly started rebooting on me for no apparent reason. Looks like I will be replacing it with a regular wireless webcam. I know I am going to miss the video quality of the phone.
I bought a pair of wansview IP camera’s from Amazon. My android phone has much better quality, but the trade off is no pan/tilt and night vision.
