webcam thing

Yes, I can. But maybe because I have a Dropbox account.

How do you make sure you don't exceed the Dropbox storage limit with such a camera when it dumps pics via timer?

It should be public.

Yawcam just writes over the same file. It can be set up to generate N rotating/sequential file names, which would be better for a security application. I just want to see the snow up at the cabin, which is where this will go.

I was pushing the pix to an FPT site, but that would hang up now and then, and it was hard for things like iPads to access. Dropbox seems very robust. I can also recompile and replace executable programs, like my thermostat thing, remotely.

It's also going to allow me to drop a command-line file into the shared folder from anywhere, and the mini-itx will see that and execute it. That can do, say, a remote reboot.

Dropbox has an option to archive every rev of every file, forever, which would be another way to look at a time series of snapshots. Can you imagine how many hard drives they (they use Amazon) must use?

Yes, I can see it. And I don?t have a dropbox account.

Cheers

Hey, someone stole the white truck! It's gone!

So the thermostat fetches the new program and bootloads itself? Cool.

What I don't understand is how they finance this Freemium 2GB deal. That's a lot of file space in a cloud. I didn't see any ads, so far.

it's a $ or two in hdd, and I'm guessing quite few sign up for more when they get a taste of it

I just saw that every minute of the day 60hours of video is uploaded to youtube

-Lasse

Probably towed.

I run a PowerBasic program on the mini-itx that talks serial to a board that I built. It acquires several indoor and outdoor temperatures (thinfilm platinum RTDs!) and drives a relay that's hooked across the regular thermostat. I can drop a command file, and the program picks it up and executes it. The only command currently defined is to turn on the heat for N hours. The program runs a software thermostat loop. So the cabin is cozy warm when we get there.

A separate PB program looks for the Windows command-line files, and executes one if it finds it. Both PB programs, and Yawcam, are run at powerup.

I was planning to use a laptop or netbook, but none have bios's that guarantee auto-start on powerup. Some desktops can do that. The little mini-itx can.

A few per cent of their users upgrade to more space. There's no obvious mechanism for ads, as long as you don't use the web interface.

Why not just use one of the free remote control programs ? Then you can look at the camera or load programs etc.

Rheilly P

John, How quickly do those mini-ITX boxes boot up? I have a application that could use PC based control, but it would spend most of its time shut down, and then need to come back up within 10-20 seconds...

Charlie

My Samsung NC-10 netbook can do it in that time frame when used in hibernate mode. Meaning it essentially returns to the state it was in at before power-down.

But that won't work if you just yank the power. At least not without some nifty SW tricks where it would then use the "last known good" RAM mirror.

I don't know, I just built this. I do need to run the temperature acquisition/thermostat program locally, because it does analog i/o and control stuff. Yawcam works fine for pushing snapshots to FTP or, now, dropbox.

The internet service up at the cabin gets slow on big weekends, when everybody shows up and the brats all start streaming videos, so I don't have a lot of guaranteed bandwidth. The Dropbox thing, with the occasional still pic, seems OK.

Which makes one wonder about using Dropbox for sort of realtime applications.

I wonder what happens if a record-oriented random-access file is shared between apps on Dropbox. I read that they have a pretty sophisticated change-detection-update algorithm.

Yeah, I can see the image just fine. Has to be manually refreshed for updates.

What a nice view of the beauties of nature from your secluded cabin in the woods! :)

Paul

Well, I'll move it up there after I get it all working.

Don't know about that, but IME it does not work too well if the "same" file is changed on two separate machines. There is no magic change-merging algorithm to combine your two edited spreadsheets - how could there be - you end up with read-only backup versions and a mess to sort out.

Looks like they just came back, this time with a red truck.

I'll have to check... there's no monitor connected right now. It is XP, so it won't be fast.

I got it from these folks:

They're good, and answer questions, like the bios thing.

Gmail is up to 10G.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

You can do it with a version control program, e.g. git (my fave). I replicate git repositories for all my important stuff on about 7 or 8 computers in various locations. (Some client stuff and sensitive court documents can't go in the cloud, but I have them at home and at work, plus offline storage.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Git is great, I use it all the time. But it won't handle the case I am talking about. It would need special knowledge of the spreadsheet format.