Christmas Lights Webcam ... for Real!

I wasn't sure where this belonged since it encompasses Hardware, Software, Networking, or maybe is Lounge material, but I'll post here since perhaps it is an Interesting WebSite Link below (?)

Most people have gotten a pretty good chuckle out of my fun little christmas hoax where bazillions of folks around the world thought (!) they were using my christmas webcam to turn my thousands of christmas lights on and off. Heck, a picture of a MajorGeeks T-shirt ended up in quite a few print publications.

I continue to get Email about this and the #1 request (by far) is "you gotta do it for real next year." So I'd like to give that a shot for christmas 2005 and would appreciate some suggestions on how to pull it off ... for real!

Here's my page on the various issues/challenges in a top-10 list format - #1 is approval from the wife! ;-) While I don't think MajorGeeks can assist with that issue, the two main ones I'd appreciate your help on would be the webcam itself - what image format, size, and frame rate would be good, PTZ control, uplinking data to the web server, etc. The Axis guys have some nice products - who else should I be looking at? The other big issue is the power line control technology - I really do use X10 at my house (just no Internet interface), but it's doggy slow, unreliable, and lacks status information. I'm torn between going with wired technology (UPB looks interesting) or some of the emerging wireless implementations such as the iControl guys. What works best in the real world?

Yes, I'm serious about this - I have already talked to my neighbors and they are OK with the lights really blinking this time, plus have given me permission to mount a webcam on their roofs - doing more than one webcam would be nice, 'eh? So thank you in advance for your suggestions on my top-10 list and also anything else I may have missed

 

Oooh, wireless stuff!

If it were me, I'd look into making small WiFi network nodes to control both the lights and the webcams (you can get WiFi webcams anyway...). I mean, if they don't exist already, you might be able to program a PIC and find a modular wifi chipset, hook it up and write yourself a very simple protocol to send "on" "off" "stat" messages to these things, and have them reply. All they'd need to reply with is 1 or 0, and possible a node name.

The further placed webcams you might need to get a custom antenna to communicate with them, it would definatley reduce the problem of interferance. Parabolic or maybe even a yagi would do the trick.

 

don'tforget to program a cue in incase you have 10 people wanting to play with the lights at the same time.

 

Thanx goldfish for the WiFi suggestions - yea, should not be a problem with the webcam, but the 802.11 solutions in powerline control seem to be fairly recent. I hadn't thought of the attenna (duhh!) which I might end up needing because my 802.11g reception across the street can be spotty - boy, I wish 802.11n (with promised greater range) would show up.

mew2: Lets just say I had a "few" folks play with the christmas webcam the last couple of years, so there's defintely some queueing logic in the Perl-based CGi front-end ... was "throttled" at one/second ... and that got engaged a LOT! ;-)

 

hulkster,

I can't wait to see what will come of this project . Since discovering the original project was a hoax, I was interested to see if it would really be possible. I just thought that, since you mentioned 802.11n, I'd throw in that 802.11 pre-n has been released and is available at most major retailers...it boasts a considerable increase in range. The only problem is that there really is no specific pre-n or 802.11n standard yet, so interoperability between different wireless devices would be uncertain.

 

Yea, I've seen the 802.11 pre-n stuff ... kinda pricey and yea, there is no "real" standard yet. Another option would be some attenna mods - will have to actually put equipment in place to see how it works and go from there.