WebCams

Revision as of 00:44, 6 May 2012

WeatherCat can work with a webcam in one of three ways:

1. A camera connected to your Mac, controlled by WeatherCat.

2. A camera managed by a third-party application. If the software can make the current image available as a file on disk, then WeatherCat can use the image.

3. A camera connected to a network that makes its image available via http:, normally as a .jpg, .png or .gif.

To set up the way WeatherCat gets the image form your webcam, go to Preferences->WebCam.

WeatherCat can use the webcam in the following ways:

1 To provide images in various size to your Simple [1] and Custom [2] web pages.

2 To provide time-lapse movies to your Custom web [3] pages.

3 To upload your webcam image to Wunderground [4].

4 To save images and movies to your hard-disk for further archival and/or editing. Images can be kept for up to 24 hours, movies for up to 7 days.

Images/movie frames can be captured at a maximum rate of once every 5 seconds.

Suggested Webcams

Logitec WebCam Pro 9000 [5]

Trixology uses a Logitec WebCam Pro 9000 mounted internally, directly controlled by WeatherCat. This camera has been in use for over two years 24/7/365 with not a single problem and runs over a 5m active USB extension cable (note the maximum length for USB as recommended by the USB.org is 5m [6]). The camera offers good value for money whilst being able to cope with the difficult task of capturing weather images in all conditions. It offers 2 megapixels physical resolution (sometimes advertised as 8 megapixels, but this is via interpolation) and a Carl Zeiss lens at a very reasonable price. As this is a UVC camera [7] , no drivers are required for Mac OS X.