Graduation - Increased camera framerate

After returning from a more than one-week-long absence, the webcam and the server are running fine - no crashes or problems had occured.

The framerate is now increased to one image every 15 seconds, to account for the increased activity during the graduation ceremonies. The images are being recorded, with the potion to integrate them into a time-lapse movie at a later time.

Webcam unsupervised until 23.July

Again, the webcam will run without me being able to restart it until 23.July. The Graduation week will commence on 21.July, and therefore the camera will be set to record images. To avoid memory problems, the capture rate is set to once per 2 minutes.

Brief Problems

After an update fo Windows XP Service Pack 3, the video capture software did not run anymore. This seemed to happen due to an incorrect assignment of the used camera. Unfortunately there was no way to select explicitly a camera, so I had to access the source code and force the selection of a particular video capture device. Not very elegant, but it works. There is room for improvvement: e.g., implement a convenient camera selection dialogue. I thought that I had done that when writing the C++ class for video capture, but apparently it did not work corectly - will have to check that out later.

For now, the capture is running again well. Capture rate is set at 1 image per 15 seconds, recording is for now disabled.

Open Day at Leeds Met

The view of the camera has been adjusted to cover only the front of the marquee and the James Graham Building, no sky is visible. This provides a larger view of the area where pedestrians are walking. At the Open Day today, we expect several 1000 visitors.

The recording has been set to four images per minute. This should give nice material for a good time laps video.

Recent Camera Blockage

On 1. July2008, at 8:56, a window cleaner moved the vertical blinds of the windows in office 101 Caedmon. This resulted that the sun shield of the camera was shifted, and partially blocked the view since then. The images from the past 2 days were therefore partially obstructed. This problem has been solve dnow, and the camera view is fine and well.

Besides from that glitch, the server ran well, and the camera images were sent without any problems. There was a recording set to capture one picture each minute, which worked great. Have now a couple of sunset and sun rises for a nice time laps video montage. The recording has now stopped - images are now only shown on the web without being recorded.

The view of the camera is now slightly adjusted to give more view of the area in front of the marquee tents.

This coming weekend is an open day. There will be quite some activity going on here at the campus. I may set the camera again to recording, to get a video of the "buzz".