Wireless Webcam?
May. 25th, 2008 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asterrocI want to set up a webcam to remotely watch my bird. (Kappa's a camera whore.) I don't have a computer located near the cage so I want this to either wirelessly connect to my Mac, or wirelessly connect to my router. I want it to automatically upload one photo every five minutes (or some other interval) to some host or other (I'm looking for recommendations there too).
Is this possible? If so, how?
Is this possible? If so, how?
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 12:52 pm (UTC)I would be interested in knowing, too!
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Date: 2008-05-26 01:18 pm (UTC)FWIW, there are home security systems that can do all of this in an internal network and be checked later; the catch is I want it to end up on the web so I can see it from work.
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Date: 2008-05-26 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 02:35 am (UTC)Is your landlord tech-saavy?
If no, then he probably left the default password on.
If yes, then he should understand port-forwarding, which is a very easy to do. It's totally within the rules of etiquette and reasonability to ask for it.
For giggles and grins:
Go to http://192.168.1.1
If prompted for a login, put user: "admin" passwd: "admin"
Let me know if it lets you in. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 03:10 pm (UTC)http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16830137004
If you want to shop around, there's a "similar items" link on that page, but I think this one has a pretty good price point.
You'd probably much better quality for what you want if you could use a $100 digital camera (not a webcam) with a wireless USB setup, but you'd have to set up some fancy software solution.
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Date: 2008-05-26 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 02:40 am (UTC)If that's completely out of the question, then we can talk about writing a script. Automated posting to something like flickr would be tricky. It'd be a lot easier to just push the file up to a host.
Do you have a shell account at the school you teach? If so, there's a very good chance that you're already set up for basic hosting. If you're stuck, I have some webspace on geekisp that I'm not using -- I'd just have to ask the guy to open a new site directory (for free).
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 03:09 am (UTC)I do not have a shell account AFAIK; I do have a webpage which I can edit via MS FrontPage, but I do not know the appropriate server name to be able to access it in other programs and I've been told by IT that it's not possible to do - I don't believe this, but the old IT people claimed that and wouldn't tell me anything useful to help me do things otherwise. There are new IT people now though, so I keep meaning to ask again.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 12:22 pm (UTC)Port Forwarding:
You can't talk to a computer without using a port. When you access http://www.livejournal.com, you're actually talking to http://www.livejournal.com:80. Port 80 is the standard port for web traffic. Likewise port 21 is the standard port for FTP and port 25 is the standard port for SMTP (e-mail transfer).
Your cable company only gave out one IP address. For this example, we'll say it's 64.1.2.3. Your router has that address. Your router, in turn, assigns each of the computers on your home network an internal address -- probably something like 192.168.1.xx or 10.0.0.xx. Nobody on the Internet ever sees an internal IP address.
Your wireless camera will have an internal IP address too. Let's say it's 192.168.1.100. And let's also say that you'll access pictures and video by going to http://192.168.1.100:8080.
Now, http://192.168.1.100:8080 will work when you're at home, but, of course, it won't work anywhere else because it's an internal IP address. You want to go to http://64.1.2.3:8080.
But that's your router's IP address. How does your router know that http://64.1.2.3:8080 needs to go to your wireless camera and not to, say, your mac or your landlord's computer? That's what port forwarding is for. You need to tell your router that requests for port 8080 need to go to 192.168.1.100.
I can walk you through it.
Sidenote: You might be wondering your cable company doesn't just let you have a public IP address for every computer on your home network. Good question. The answer is that the original designers of the Internet didn't envision the Internet's success, and there just aren't enough unique IP addresses for every device. Hopefully someday the Internet will be upgraded from IPv4 to IPv6, and all this port forwarding stuff will just be a bad dream.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 01:47 pm (UTC)One question: I thought one difficulty with accessing your home network from elsewhere (for example, setting up a webpage on your home computer) was dynamic IP address assignment, meaning that if I built and hosted a webpage on my computer today, its IP address could change tomorrow. Or five minutes from now. I see no reason that would be less of a problem with a camera.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 02:43 pm (UTC)Potential hiccup: In the unlikely event that all of the following are true:
1) The wireless camera uses port 80
2) The wireless camera does not let you change the port
3) Your router does not let you remap the port
4) Charter blocks port 80
(4 is pretty likely, the rest less so.)
... you will not be able to access your wireless camera from outside the network, and we'll have to go with the scripting option.
Dynamic IP addresses are an issue. However, with the always-on broadband connections we have today, your IP address will typically only change if you reboot your modem or have a power outage. You should be able to rely on your IP address not changing for 3 weeks at a time. It's not a bad solution if it's for your personal use.
BTW, the webpage you edit, where is it saved?
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Date: 2008-05-27 02:50 pm (UTC)The webpage's on a school server. The whole school is "Rah-Rah Windoze!" so they were claiming to me in the past that one couldn't upload a webpage w/o FrontPage. If you think you can get around that, I'd be glad to email you the URL - I keep anonymity here so I don't want to post it here.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 03:02 pm (UTC)It's quite possible that your IT department has locked down its web server so that users can only make modifications through FrontPage Server Extensions. Which means you may be SOL unless the new IT guys are really accommodating.
You really need to set up that webcam. ;-)
Heck, we could even get some two-way video and audio going! Or do you think that would be too confusing for Kappa?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 03:08 pm (UTC)How does that work? I thought a server couldn't tell what program is uploading files.
Heck, we could even get some two-way video and audio going! Or do you think that would be too confusing for Kappa?
I do have a MacBook so video chatting is possible. I'm not a fan of it though, and for the desire for spying on Kappa I don't want to have to leave my laptop near the cage all day. As for confusing, well, Kappa's recently been chiming in when T$ and I play Rock Band...
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 03:20 pm (UTC)You're right, it can't. The problem in this case is that the server speaks a special language. You could write your own application that also speaks that language, but it might be difficult.
When you change your webpage, do you save it by going to "File->Save", or is it more like right-clicking on the file in the navigation pane and selecting "commit" in the context menu?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 04:19 pm (UTC)Edit:
the server speaks a special language
Are you saying that the server doesn't actually use TCP/IP or whatever the standard data transfer protocol is?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 04:46 pm (UTC)There are four common protocols for sending files to another computer. The most common one is SMB. Windows Explorer (explorer.exe - your Windows GUI, not to be confused with Internet Explorer) uses SMB natively to save files to your network drive (H:). Whenever you browse \\computername\sharename, that's SMB. SMB runs on top of TCP/IP.
The other three are FTP, which you may be familiar with, SFTP which is file transfer over SSH, and HTTP POST, which is how you put images on flickr. All of these go over TCP/IP too.
FrontPage doesn't use any of these four methods. Now, there's probably some toolkit available on SourceForge.net that you can use to talk to a FrontPage Server without using FrontPage, but at that point we're really flexing our geek muscles. Probably doable, though.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 05:20 pm (UTC)* What if I'm using a Mac over a network in Finder, is that also SMB or is it another thing?
* Is reading files the same as writing them, for example how iTunes can read .mp3's on any computer on the network, whether Mac of Windows?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 05:51 pm (UTC)As for creating file shares on a Mac, I have to confess some degree of ignorance. OS X may create a SMB share for compatibility with Windows, but I imagine it would also expose the share using either AppleShare or AFP (Apple File Protocol). The BSD operating system on which OS X is based traditionally uses NFS, the Network File System protocol.
Most protocols for file handling let you read and write. A lot of service protocols do not. For example, HTTP lets you download files (web pages), but does not let you write files. (Actually, HTTP defines a "PUT" method, but it never works.) Likewise, iTunes lets you share your library over DAAP (Digital Audio Access Protocol), which will serve up MP3s, but it doesn't let you write. But yeah, DAAP is exactly the same whether it runs on a Mac or a PC.
Of course, you can also have iTunes grab music off of networked file shares.
You're right to put "language" in quotes, I was speaking colloquially. The proper term is "protocol." Pretty much every network protocol sits on top of TCP or UDP, which in turn sit on top of IP.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 07:08 pm (UTC)But of course every model has flaws, and recognizing the flaws of your analogy is just as crucial to good understanding in the end as picking a decent analogy was in the first place. I'm thinking that calling a protocol a "language" may be implying more complexity to protocols than they really have; perhaps comparing different protocols to different encryption schemes would be more analogous?
But I hadn't realized that there were different protocols in the first place - I thought everything just used FTP. I even thought SSH/SFTP and HTML were subsets of FTP.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 08:33 pm (UTC)I think the word you're looking for is "encoding" not "encryption". "Encryption" implies that the data has been protected from prying eyes by a cryptographic algorithm. Encoding implies that information has been stored in some kind of predictable way.
You may have heard of ASCII, for example, which is a 7-bit encoding for Latin characters. (It's largely considered a bad encoding because it's an obstacle to internationalization, but that's neither here nor there.)
You usually wouldn't use the word "encoding" for more complicated file formats such as Word's doc format -- you'd use the word format. JPEG files are in JPEG format and contain JPEG-encoded image information.
The difference between an "encoding" and a "protocol" is that the protocol actually contains instructions that a service implementing that protocol must perform. For example, if a web server receives an HTTP message with a "GET" request in it, the web server is required to either deliver the document or give a 404 error. An encoding is just a way of storing and reading data -- it doesn't require you to *do* anything with that data.
I'll try to communicate the intuition of layered protocols.
IP is pretty dumb.
The header is basically an encoding of the following information:
"I'm version 4 of IP."
"My header is xx bytes long"
"If I travel through more than xx routers, please kill me because I'm lost!"
"The sum of all bytes in this packet modulus 2^16 should be 3F2B. Pretend I'm 0000 while doing the calculation. (checksum)"
"My data is xx bytes long"
"I'm coming from 64.1.2.3."
"Send me to 83.7.3.5."
"Oh, and here's some DATA. I have no idea what it is, but you can have it!"
That's pretty much it. No guarantees of delivery. No port number.
The TCP packet goes inside the data of the IP packet.
"I'm going to port 80"
"I'm coming from port 10837."
"I'm part of a larger message. I'm sequence number 3. If you get sequence number 4 before you get me, be sure to look at me first."
"My header is xx bytes long"
"Here's my checksum."
"My data is this long"
"Here's mah data. I don't know what it is, but here you go!"
There's other stuff in TCP, like, "Hey, can you chat?" "Yup, I can chat. Did you hear me?" "Yes, I heard you." "Could you resend sequence #2? I didn't get it."
An HTTP request goes inside the data segment of the TCP packet.
HTTP 1.1
GET /browse/product?id=93847
\n\n
The TCP packet will specify Port 80. A program on the web server has asked the operating system to hand over the data of every TCP packet that was received with a port 80 designation. The program will treat all TCP packets as if they contained HTTP requests, rejecting anything it doesn't understand.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 10:06 pm (UTC)Actually, that's the thing I was most frustrated about with Number Theory at CTY. I learned the methodologies very well, and became good at thinking creatively about proofs and about mathematics in general. I did get a lot out of the course. But I don't know what the Chinese Remainder Theorem is, even though I'm fairly sure we learned it, because they had an in-joke name for it.
I mean, they had a reason for it- to show that the names were arbitrary and the mathematics were true no matter what you called it. But the fact is, there is a right name and in communicating with others you need to use the same terminology as them.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 10:59 pm (UTC)In my gen ed science classes (astro, earth and space, physical science), if it's a concept that I feel is key to the subject matter (such as isotopes or inertia) I will start with the proper terminology and the scientific explanation, and then follow up with an analogy (such as car paint jobs for isotopes, or the Couch Potato Law for the law of inertia). Students in those classes have a hard time understanding the basic concepts w/o being able to relate it to something more familiar to their every day lives. The concepts may be important to them in later life, but the *names* of the concepts will likely not be.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-28 01:35 pm (UTC)It's an analogy that will only take you so far. Consider Carbon-14, for example. If your student hears that Carbon-14 is radioactive, will they assume that all other Carbons are radioactive, too? Adding a neutron to an element does more to it than adding a new paint job.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 08:33 pm (UTC)Edit: Here's some Amazon reviews. I'm a bit skeptical of it now, seems like a third of the people have a reboot issue.