CatCam Project
Introduction
No cats were harmed in the production of this webpage. Although
sadly, Scrumpy passed away on November 30th 2005, references
remain in his memory.
Johanna and I 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.
Hardware
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.
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 :)
Current Status
Future
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!)
Can I see it?
Nope! Johanna and I 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.
Can I have the software?
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).
Let me (catcam@fermit.org.uk
) know if you find it useful!