Loading Images into Weather Display

Weather Weather Photography
1

In the past I have used a Logitech Webcam to produce live weather images for my weather web site using weather display software (www.emeraldbeachweather.com.au). Earlier this year I upgraded the camera to a digital acquired from a Melbourne (Aust.)company named Reliveit (www.reliveit.com.au). My problem is that the camera system uploads images via the 3G network to a server which in turn sends them to my FTP server.Each image is individually named and includes a time stamp, ie emeraldbeach201305310810.jpg. Can anyone please advise how to get these images into weather display?

2

What do you want to do with the images once they’re in WD?
Is it just for storage, building a video, upload the individual images to your website?
How often do you need them downloaded?

Also, you mention “my server”, is this a personal server at your home or is you website hosted?

3

you could use the HTTP download in WD, via a custom tags in the URL , i.e for time/date, to download the appropriate image

4

One of the links in www.emeraldbeachweather.com.au is to display the current weather picture, this is mainly what the pics are used for. The upload frequency of the pics is definable. Frequency of shots is currently set to every ten minutes from 0600 to 1800 hrs every day. This timing is set because of the overhead and potential cost of data upload of around 90MB per day. It would also be nice to be able to produce the all day video using these images as I did with WD previously.

The FTP server is my own and is located in my home office. I have my own domain and also host my own web site.

Thanks for your interest and any assistance would be appreciated.

5
Thanks for your interest and any assistance would be appreciated
please see my post above
6

So, are you saying that it’s possible to download a file such as “image_20130705_1320.jpg”, where the filename changes constantly with time and date using Http in WD? You mention custom tags here. Could you explain a little more for me perhaps with an example syntax.

Thanks.

7

there are custom tags for time/date
(i.e like %year%, etc)
and so you set to use those in the custom HTTP download

8

I have the same issue - my IP Camera FTP’s images to a folder on my web host server at a time interval of 600 seconds between capture. The image file name is made up as follows - Camera ID followed by yyyymmddhhmmss_nnnn where nnnn is the capture number since the camera was last rebooted.

Whilst I can use custom tags to set up the yyyymmhh section for the filename to be downloaded I can’t see any way of matching the mmss_nnnn and as far as I am aware ‘wildcards’ are not valid.

Any clues welcome!

David

9

why not setup WD’s webcamcapture program , IP setup, to get a current version from your IP camera
there is a FAQ on how to setup an IP camera

10

WD can also grab an image generated by a php script, so another, maybe simpler, way to solve the changing filename problem is to make your php capable webserver do a little work and select the latest image. This script will search the .jpg’s in its directory and display the one with the highest alpha sorted filename:

<?php 
$pics = glob("*.jpg");
$image=imagecreatefromjpeg(array_pop($pics));
header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
imagejpeg($image);
?>

Enter the url of the .php script in WD’s image url box instead of a .jpg.

This is a very simple example, there are more complex ones that include error handling to be found on the web.