The ArcterCam has changed from the original design of a live cam. Now I just take a picture and update it, but for those of you who might want to know how to have a live (or semi-live) cam, here's how to do it!

Well, it's easy, all you need is the hardware (a cam) and a net connection of some sort. What I'll lay out for you here is how to do the code to make your cam page similar to mine, ie: updating every minute, and having a datestamp on it.

Software you'll need:

• cqcam [.deb|.rpm] (for color quickcams) or qcam [.deb|.rpm](black and white quickcams), or any of the other versions available here. This is the software that takes the image from the quickcam and creates a graphic file from it.
• Stamp or something similar. This will modify the images taken by the cam with text such as a date, time, or message.
• ncftp, and in particular, ncftpput [.deb]. There are other ways of doing this, but this program will let you do an FTP upload (or if you use ncftpget you can do a download) from a single command.

That's it. Now you can do the following anyway you want, but I did it as follows:

In /etc/crontab I have the line:
* * * * * root nice /usr/local/bin/qcam.sh

This executes a script that I've created called qcam.sh every minute, of every day.

Below is the script. Note: Your milage may vary with this. Read the disclaimer at the top of the script before blindly copying and pasting.

#!/bin/bash # /usr/local/bin/qcam.sh # Script copyright Arcterex, 1999-forever # Disclaimer: YMMV... I've hardcoded a few things that didn't work right for # me, such as the parallel port (the -p 0x3bc), the brightness control (-b # 210), and the output conversion (for some reason saving to jpg with -J # doesn't work for me). if [ -z $ARCTERSTATUS ]; then HOURSTRING=`date +%k`; case $HOURSTRING in 1|2|3|4|5|6) ARCTERSTATUS="ArcterSleeping (maybe)";; 9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18) ARCTERSTATUS="ArcterWorkin";; *) ARCTERSTATUS="The ArcterCam";; esac fi qcam -p 0x3bc -b 210 -B 6 -D -W > /tmp/pic.ppm convert /tmp/pic.ppm JPEG:/tmp/pic2.jpg stamp -i /tmp/pic2.jpg -o /tmp/pic.jpg -y /usr/local/stamp-1.3/standard.fnt \ -z /usr/local/stamp-1.3/standard.fnt -s 1 -u "$ARCTERSTATUS" \ -l "`date +%A' '%B' '%d' '%r`" ncftpput -u alan -p secret 192.168.1.1 /var/www/ufies/cam /tmp/pic.jpg \ > /dev/null 2>&1 rm -f /tmp/pic.ppm /tmp/pic.jpg /tmp/pic2.jpg

That's it!

The cron program runs qcam.sh every minute. qcam.sh takes the picture, and then based on the time, and if the environment variable $ARCTERSTATUS is set. You can set your own times, dates, and text of course. This is a very simple setup, in the future I'll modify this so that it looks at the day or other stuff as well. You can also just add a line such as ARCTERSTATUS="Gone Fishing" at the top, and that will show up instead of the time-set text.

If you don't have a full time net connection, you can set it to go out only every 10/20/60 minutes or whatever, simply by manipulating the cron line. If you have a diald setup, this can upload a picture to the net automatically. Or if you want to just do a picture a day (like the FrickCam), forego the crontab entry and just run the qcam.sh script when you want to take a picture.

The script then runs the picture through the stamp program, which puts the datestamp on the bottom and the text from $ARCTERSTATUS on top. Then it uploads the picture to a server on the Internet (in my case my firewall, 192.168.1.1).

If you want to find out how to make a remote window, or have your page refresh every minute, just take a look at the source HTML on the main page.

Easy huh?