Turn my halloween decorations on and off ..

Figured DP'ers might appreciate this - the halloween webcam is now operational and/or check out the main halloween decorations page for the whole story! ;-)

 

Nice page Alek, why don't you give us a lesson on networking a camera to a website?

 

There are several FAQ links from the halloween webcam page - although I've been a bit busy putting everything togather, so they need some updating.

 

Ther code has a one-second throttle, so it would be a slow means of communication, plus I don't know Morse code! ;-)

BTW, speaking of communication, in my what's new for Halloween 2004 list I had an item:

3. Some sort of text based light board where you can enter the text. I got this clever idea from these guys where they have a webcam pointing at a computer screen, and you can enter some text and it is displayed. Would be really cool if I could have some sort of alphanumeric text board that I could feed data too - pls Email me if you have any recommendedations. UPDATE: maybe at Christmas 2004

So what I had played around with was mounting this on my garage and then make it web addressable - just doesn't look like all the "glue" to make it happen will be done for Halloween though.

 

I don't get the joke but I am not on the same level as you coders mentally

 

just make sure to loop it for like 10 hours so you can be sure he sees it

great idea alek, looks like it will be fun to play with

 

I still want you to tell us how to do it Alek, no one is going to look at an FAQ

 

It normally auto-fires up at 2000 Mountain Time, but I just got home and "flipped the switch" so come on by the halloween webcam and let me know what you think! ;-)

 

Brilliant Alek, I am sure that someone around here will want to hire you to do some programming for them one day.

Once I get my venture capital I will get ahold of you for sure.

Don't hold your breath, I did check out the following.

http://www.komar.org/xmas/faq/x10_sensors.html

I also seen your main FAQ page.

Thanks and good luck with the pages, they look great, I am on dial up so I am sure that those with Broadband will have a lot more fun with it.

Cheers Alek

 

It's actually about as bandwidth friendly as I can make it - there are 3 GIF's that are about 1 KByte that are used for navigation (so should only be loaded once), the main 640x480 image is almost always less than 20KBytes, and the html code is about 16 KBytes (slightly larger on IE since it supports the zoom extension).

Glad you like it ... and good job finding/reading the FAQ - they are out there for a reason! ;-)

 

Your place looks so cool!!! I wish I had a house to do that to. Of course my wife would kill me.

 

Since it is that time of the year, I tweeked the code of the halloween webcam so that you can cast a vote (by toggling the lights) for Bush, Kerry ... or the HULK!

So far, Hulk is winning ... ;-)