meteohub.de

Hello all,

Has anyone had any luck getting a USB video camera to work on the Iconnect?

Dave

Yes - see http://rainer.me.uk/weather/webcam.php although on anything other than a dull day at this time of year, sun glare washes the image out. I willl be trying a hood over it later today; the cam is in the case of a cheap outdoor floodlight.

This is a Philips cam which is not on the meteohub list. I tried a Microsoft one, which is on the list, which gave a picture that is only correctly exposed for indoor use - outside images are completely washed out, even without any sun. The same cam works fine outside connected to a pc.

The Philips cam produces a 640x480 image with a 250k file, which seems way too high for what is needed. I can get it down to less than 70k using compresssion with much the same quality. It ccould be down to the camera having a max resolution of 1.3mp and some scaling down occurring, but even the Microsoft one produces 150k images if tested indoors.

I have the cam running on a 17 min upload interval to hopefully not get too close in time to other generated files. The upload cron command is */17 07-16 * * * Vary the 7am to 4pm setting to fit in with your daylight hours. This generates a file every 17 minutes during the day.

John

John,
How did you get the usb webcam to work with meteohub and the iconnect?
Thanks.

Greg

I plugged the camera into a free usb port on the iconnect, selected video-0 for webcam 1 in Meteohub, 640 x480 and then clicked Save. Once saved, an image appeared, refreshed by clicking Display. In Graph Uploads , selected webcam-1 from the list, set up the schedule as described earlier and gave the file a name (anyname.jpg).

The quality is not good. The same camera on a Windows PC, with even a simple application like Amcap, gives a much better image and copes with a full range of indoor and outdoor lighting conditions far, far better than Meteohub does.

The Philips cam I'm using is not on the Meteohub list but I do have one that is (Microsoft VX3000). It only works in very dull conditions and washes out in cloudy daylight, let alone sunshine. Again, it works very well with Amcap in Windows but it is not useable with the iconnect.

The manual says: "Most USB cams have severe problems handling outdoor light conditions, so it remains questionable if a USB cam can be used as a weather cam". Well, in my very limited experience of 2 such cams, they work fairly well with outdoor lighting conditions; it's meteohub that has a problem. To be fair, support is described as experimental but I hope Boris can make some improvements.

John

[edit] The camera is mounted in the case of a cheap outdoor floodlight - just took the reflector and other innards out and glued it in position inside.

JohnR, how far away is your webcam from the iConnect? How long of a USB cable do you have? I'm trying to figure out how to get my webcam in a better position to provide a shot of the sky.