CatCam

No cats were harmed in the production of this webpage. Although sadly, Scrumpy passed away on November 30th 2005, references remain in his memory. Pride passed away on July 26th 2011 so this page is now here for the sake of history. RIP little doode.

We like to be able to keep an eye on our two cats Scrumpy and Pride so I came up with CatCam. CatCam allows you to look at the cats either via a web page or via a WAP enabled phone.

I like Sun kit, and it just so happened that I had a spare SBUS Sun Video card, and a Sparc Station 10. The sparc 10 was already under the stairs and running Solaris (needed for the SBUS 8 port serial card it looks after), and so the Sun Video card went in.

The software packages took a little finding, however when the correct packages were installed the card came to life.

The Sun Video card can take 3 inputs, so to begin with I connected a camera and started to write a bit of Software.

Firstly I needed to compile up an example application that comes with the Sun Video drivers. This example program allows you to (amongst other things) grab a single Jpeg image at a time from any one of the three inputs the card has, splendid.

Before long I had a very simple, and quite ugly script knocked up that grabs an image, scp's it to the web server, and then runs convert on the image and puts a copy on the wap virtual host on the webserver.

We went on holiday to Scotland at this point, knowing we could look at the house, or any creatures in the house :)

Wouldn't it be great if it could see in the dark? And turn on and off automatically when we are in out (we don't need to look on CatCam to find the cats when we are in the house!)

Nope! We are really not into letting random people look at our house, it seems a little odd to us, and we also don't really want people to know if we are in or not, so we are keeping it to ourselves! Bah!

Can we at least see what sort of images it gives?

Yeah, sure, have a look here, and if we spot the cats looking cute, we'll put some more pictures in here.

Yep! The code is pretty hacky mind you! I have also put the Sun Video drivers here as well (6.3 Mb), hopefully sun will not mind!

You can grab it (pun intended) Here (37k).