Hi-ho Following on from the analogue dials on the computer at the fest (Which I'll bring to the next meeting BTW) I've got my remote controlled webcam working..
You can find the prototype at http://chris.trash.co.nz for tonight, I'll move it to work tomorrow... The interface sucks, and it's hosted on a slow connection, so don't expect too much, but you can look around my 'office' :-). The image quality is a bit poor as I'm using high compression on the jpeg's to help the slow line for testing... It also dosn't do 'sessions' so it's a first-in first served for controlling it, and you can fight over it.. :-). For the Linux relevance.. It's a Creative webcam 5 plugged into a toshiba 440cdx laptop running Redhat 7.3 (no gui). The laptop runs Apache 1.3.22, and some custom C cgi stuff I've written to move the camera in a small robotic 'yoke' of sorts.. Same servo controller circuit that I used at the installfest for the dials. I also had to re-write part of 'webcam' which is part of xawtv as my images were comming out mirror image.. It's a USB device which is supported under the kernel using the pwc module, but the maintainer has a comment on his site about mirror imaging which says basically 'you're not alone, but I've not fixed it' so I fixed it at the app end after trying three different kernels, and a custom pwc.o as well.. You're getting to the camera via a dynamic dns address which points at my linux (RH7.1) based firewall machine, which nats to the laptop which is on my home LAN. I'm quite happy to go into more detail if anyone is interested in any aspect of this... I did it as a learning project, so if others can learn a bit all things are good.. The theory is that I'll put it in different places around the WAN at work, and people will be able to get to varoius views of the district depending on where the camera is on that day. I'll have to work on the HTML first of course.. The cam will be online untill I got to bed, probably 1am ish. Enjoy :-).
