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I thought I’d follow up on my post of a little while ago about the drivers for the Trendnet TV-IP400W Pan-Tilt-Zoom camera. I wrote a ruby driver for this thing, which makes it trivial to control the camera from any Ruby application. It’s just a single Ruby file, and though I’ve entertained the thought of figuring out how to pour it into a gem and publish it to the plugin repository, I’d probably only do that if there are a significant amount of people interested in using it and/or contributing to it.

As with the old Perl driver for Zoneminder (which I’ve been told doesn’t work anymore with the latest version of ZM, since the interfaces for the PTZ drivers have completely changed), this driver only controls the pan and tilt functions of the camera. Actually, you can also put it in swing mode and store or access preset positions, but none of the available functions actually do anything with the video stream. The video can simply be accessed at:

http://yourcam/image.jpg to grab a single frame of the current camera view
http://yourcam/video.cgi to get the mjpeg stream from the camera

There’s no real zoom control since the cam only has a digital zoom, which I believe is implemented in the client software only (so there’s no way to actually have it stream a zoomed image to your client).

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I love outdoor webcams, because they can give you an instant and live view of what the weather and/or a location looks like in places all around the world. Two sites that are great for exploring these live views all around the world are earthcam and cammap.net (though the latter appears to show only US based cams). They are simple services that simply put a database of webcams around the world on top of interactive maps. It’s the kind of site I’ve always wanted to build myself… It’s been done now but that’s ok because I plenty of ideas for other types of web sites left.
As I was browing our local webcams I came across an interesting one though… The Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley has a fixed cam pointed towards the bay of San Francisco, and records a snapshot of the view every minute of every day. Every day they automatically generate a little movie out of that, which you can view online. I’ve embedded the video here too, so what you’re seeing here is what yesterday looked like over here. Depending on what day you look at this video, you may catch some of our fantastic sunsets over the bay, the beautiful fog rolling in or out, or all kinds of other weather patterns moving over the East Bay. For the real weather enthousiast, check out the timelaps movie archive with some of the most stunning days caught on video.

The above image of the view from the East Bay hills is at most a couple of minutes old (unless the camera is down). Click to view yesterday’s timelapse movie.