Hi everyone,

Have any of you ever used a web cam over dialup to monitor something? How did it work? What are the group's opinions as to the best hardware/software solution?

The requirement is that a remote computer, with several cameras attached to it provides a way to view and monitor those cameras remotely -- using only dialup without a full-time connection.

I realize this seems simple, and many web cam options are available, but the complication is that the remote computer only has access to dialup. No highspeed or full time internet connection is available. The idea is to monitor a cabin several hours away to make sure no damage has occured and to see if there is enough snow for snomobiling (making a drive up worthwhile).

It would be fine if the remote computer dialed in hourly or something and uploaded a static image to a server. Live is not a requirement and video is not a requirement. Static images on a schedule are sufficient.

Ideally, one should be able to dial up the remote computer from another location and change settings like capture frequency, etc.

I think the hardware piece of this is pretty simple. It's the remote software that I wonder about.

Any experiences?

Jim

I have the exact same desire and requirements.

My only difference is that I have an alarm system setup that answers the phone and calls me if an alarm goes off. I imagine something could be done with distinctive ring. Maybe the computer (or whatever) could only answer distinctive ring calls on a fewer number of rings than the alarm.

Not to give the standard my-car-stereo-runs-linux answer, but this is one of those problems that screams to use linux. Any decent Pentium or PII could do this with minimal effort... Once script can grab a set of images, save them to the hard drive, bring up a dial up connection, upload them, and sign off. You could do the whole thing on a bootable CD and not even need a hard drive.

Matthew

[smart arse mode]
save them to the hard drive....
and not even need a hard drive

Cool Trick
[/smart arse mode]

yeah yeah... ok, bring up dial up, grab images, pipe directly to remote server, drop dial up connection...

Matthew

Or use a ramdisk.

Email Jon@jonshouse.co.uk (Jonathan Andrews, a friend of mine), and ask him about the product he is developing for this task.

pca

I got to thinking. PC Anywhere or Terminal Server could probably be the simplest answer. Just dial-up the cabin and take control. You could then control the camera(s) from the PC live.

In my case I will need to make sure they answer on distinctive ring. I think they can do that.

Distinctive ring answering is set in modem properties.

Talking to yourself is good, right?