I’ve played around with a weather Web cam in the past, but none of the free software packages worked out for me.  I looked into writing my own software, and even got something started, but never followed through and completed it.  I may still come back to it one day, but I wanted to get something that worked now.

I have a Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks that I’ve been happy with.  The picture quality is good enough for this purpose.  The only software I was happy with were commercial packages, but I decided to experiment with the free software again.  I saw that Yawcam had been updated recently, so I downloaded the latest version.  When I had tried Yawcam in the past, it would run for a day or so and then completely lock up, requiring me to shut down and restart the software.  I’m giving it another try to see if it still has that issue or not.

I taped the camera to an upper story window on the front of my house with a view of the horizon.  I installed the software and set it up to upload an image to my Web site using FTP once per minute.  I may change the interval, but for now that works.  I also set up the software to act as a streaming server.  Opening this URL in my browser brought up a moving image from the Web cam.  So now I had it working on my local network.  Time to move on to the Internet.

I already had Web pages for the Web cam on my weather Web site, so I just updated them to point to my home server.  I have a domain at DynDNS of cloppermill.dyndns.org, so I used that.  I set up firewall rules to permit traffic on the streaming port and to route it to the computer with the Web cam attached.  Just like that I had a streaming Web cam set up.

I may still tweak some things.  I’m not sure I’m happy with the camera position yet.  The default Web page for the streaming server could use some sprucing up.  I could add some time lapse movies, historical pictures, and even submit my Web cam URL to Weather Underground.  But first I have to see if the software is stable or not.  I won’t find that out until after I leave it running for a few days.

Update: The Yawcam software exhibited the same behavior as before.  The text it overlays on the image is updating but the image itself hasn’t changed for hours.  It successfully updates the Web site and I can still connect to the streaming server, but the image is still the old image with the updated date and time overlay.  Looks like I need to explore some other software packages to see what will work for me.