Technology

I needed a way of keeping an eye on the conditions at my ranch. I built a system that sends images every hour to a server in Houston. Click on the live thumb to the left to check out the current conditions. I did this by using an old Dell Optiplex and an Olympus D-460Z camera. The camera is mounted in the window and the server on the floor. The camera snaps a 1.3 megapixel shot every hour from 7a - 7p with the help of PhotoPC software. The software pulls the image from the camera and saves it to the hard drive. The image is resized with ImageMagick and time stamped with jdatestamp. The dialup modem connection to Valley Telephone is established with wvdial and the 100k image is sent to the Houston closet server via FTP. The cycle takes about five minutes to complete. If you check back around 7p CDT you might catch some wildlife like these wild hogs.