How to make your own amateur webcam on a site
You did not want a webcam when viewing the amateur radio pages? After all, radio amateurs, especially those, who go to broadcast in nature are in an attractive environment, which is exactly what it calls for, to be visited in person if not already, so at least immortalized on photographic paper, tape or digital memory. Well, of course, so that as many people as possible can see it... and immediately.
Making your own webcam on the site is not difficult. These things are necessary for this:
- Webcam (digital camera)
- A computer connected to the Internet
- Appropriate software
- Code in the page
Webcam (digital camera)
Today, it is not unusual to have a webcam or digital camera. It must support webcam mode. It is connected to a PC via a USB cable. USB support in the operating system is not always enough, finally at least you know, after which the manufacturer included the CD with the camera.
A computer connected to the Internet
You don't even need a fast connection, rather, you have to reckon with it, that it is a permanent connection. So dial-up would be sufficient in terms of speed, however, it is charged based on the length of the connection and that is not very advantageous. So GPRS, EDGE, DSL a pod.
Windows can be used as an operating system, Linux aj MacOS. The choice then depends on him
Appropriate software
There are a whole bunch of such programs. Most are shareware. Here I want to draw attention to it, that the FTP connection is active during the entire transfer of images to the web. Since most of us are not the author of such a program, nowhere do you know what data the program is sending. So I highly recommend the firewall.
One of the freeware programs under Win is WebcamFirst. After installation, set the FTP connection parameters (ftp server, ussername, password, possibly also a directory) and transmitted images (size, quality, effects, embedded texts,…). You can immediately see what the image from the webcam looks like in the program.
Code in the page
It is ideal to load a thumbnail (small preview image), which we put in the reference link, which will open a new window with a larger image and automatic refresh. How to do it?
Such a piece of code might look like this, for example (due to the correct display of the article, sharp brackets are replaced by rounded ones):
(a href=”http://www.mojastranka.sk/webcam.htm” target=”_blank”)(img src=”http://www.mojastranka.sk/webcam/webcam_mini.jpg” widht=”118″ height=”88″)(/a)
This will serve as a possible example. Images from the webcam are uploaded to the directory “webcam”. A small will appear in the block, just a few kilobyte image. Clicking on it will open a new browser window with the webcam.htm file. It can look like this:
(HTML) (HEAD) (META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” CONTENT=”120″) (META HTTP-EQUIV=”pragma” CONTENT=”no-cache”) (TITLE>WEBCAM – automatically reloading every 120 sec(/TITLE) (/HEAD) (BODY) (CENTER)(img src=”http://www.mojastranka.sk/webcam/webcam.jpg” width=”640″ height=”480″)(/CENTER) (/BODY) (/HTML)
It's actually a tiny HTML file, whose content is automatically loaded again and again. Displays a large image from the webcam. Who wants to, can add a countdown script, which will inform when the contents of the window will be loaded again.
The webcam on the OM3RKP website can serve as inspiration www.om3rkp.cq.sk.
