About the Server...

Behind the Curtain

At the other end of my solar powered webcam is a desktop P.C. The important features and components of this machine are as follows:

  1. Make and Model: Dell Dimension 4600 Pentium 4
  2. Operating System: Windows XP w/ S.P. 3
  3. Speed: 2.8 GHz
  4. Memory: 512MB DDR SDRAM
  5. Graphics Card: ATI Rage 128 PRO Ultra GL AGP
  6. Video Capture Card: ATI TV Wonder VE
  7. Network Adapter: Intel PRO 100 VE Integrated
  8. Internet Service: AT&T Yahoo DSL + SpeedStream Modem
  9. Router: Netgear WPN824 v2 RangeMax Wireless
  10. Video Server Program: Yawcam
  11. IP Address Management Program: No-IP Free DNS▼

photo of desktop P.C.
Not nearly as interesting is the receiving end of the wireless webcam. The wireless receiver is just out of the frame of the above photo. A six foot long RCA cable connects it to the back of the P.C.

Compatibility

I installed the ATI graphics card and video capture card myself. The "Rage" series of ATI graphics card is necessary for the video capture card to function properly. The video capture card includes a RCA input jack for "video in" which is especially handy considering the webcam wireless transmitter's receiver contains a "video out" RCA jack.▼▲

photo of wireless receiver
Shown here is the wireless receiver. The black cable at the back is the power cord. The yellow cable is the video cable that connects to my PC's video card. Its other end is shown in the next photo below. The red cable is the audio-out line which is not currently connected to anything at the other end because sound is not really important for a weather cam.

You've Been Served

The last piece of the puzzle is how to serve the streaming video to the world wide web. A powerful freeware (donations welcome) server software takes the video signal from the video capture card and serves it to the internet through the assigned port. Remember to configure your firewall to unblock that port. Also, don't forget to forward that port in your wireless router if necessary. One last detail worth mentioning is the fact that my ISP uses dynamic IP addresses, so each time I reboot my PC I'm assigned a new address. This gets annoying because for the video stream to display properly the current IP address must be entered by hand into the Java applet which means I have to determine the new IP address, log into my hosting account, update the page source and hope I don't have to reboot my machine again anytime soon. But frequent reboots are inevitable with a Windows computer so I had to find a way to eliminate this chore. The Domain Update Client is just the solution I needed and it's free!▲

photo of video capture card
The yellow end of an RCA cable can be seen in the above photo connected to the line-in jack of my video capture card. Please excuse the dust. The other end of this cable is connected to the line-out jack on the wireless receiver.

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