Solar Powered Web Cam

I have a shed that I mounted a wireless weather station on a couple of years ago. I have always wanted to mount a webcam out there to 'see' the weather. There is a 1000' TV tower that I use to judge how bad the weather is...the less antenna I see, the worse the weather.

The wireless weather station uses 2 AA batteries that last roughly half a year...easy.

However a webcam is going to use MUCH more power than that...I didn't want to run electric out there...with the weather station on a metal pole, I didn't want to add a path for lightening to enter the house...because lets face it, if I am going to go through the effort to run power, I will also run CAT5.

So I thought solar might be nice, I already have a battery in the shed (lawn tractor) I could use the solar panel to charge the battery, and the battery will allow the camera to run day or night, rain or shine.

But how to get the solar panel power to the battery and webcam...well I bought a 15w solar panel that came with a 12v battery charger. I mounted the panel to the shed (60 deg angle for winter sun) and measured 24ish volts. Hooked the panel to the charger and battery and got around 13 volts...and the battery was charging...all is well.

Then I hooked the webcam up...it worked, great picture! It worked for a few days...then stopped. I check everything and find the battery is completely discharged...and charger is showing charged...I unplug the webcam and the charger now starts charging the battery.

So point #1 be careful on what you get for a charger. I am now buying a different charger, that has a tap to put your 12v loads on and will even keep you from discharging the battery too much when the solar isn't there. (SunSaver 6 amp solar SS-6L)

Enough of that...what about the webcam?

Needs to be wireless, 12v, good picture, small...and relatively cheap.

Asante Voyager I Wireless 1.3 Megapixel CMOS Day and Night IP Security Camera

I don't know how long it will last...but it takes great pictures/video.

I will cut to the chase, I did a little cutting on the camera case, mounted it in a box, cut a piece of Lexan for the window and sealed it in place. Ran electric too it and sealed that hole. I don't have an external antenna, the one that came with it is fine. The pictures should explain the rest.







Here is the result, the first picture is straight from the camera, the second one is after my weather software puts a caption on it...yes it is compressed too much, I need to play with the settings.

Windows 7 first thoughts

I replaced Vista on my laptop (the M1330) with Windows 7 a week ago.

I used an upgrade version of Win7 and installed on a new blank HD. I used this procedure from the My Digital Life blog. Workaround 3: Clean Install and Activate Windows 7 with MediaBootInstall Registry Hack

I won't reproduce it all here...but the summary is you change one registry entry and then activate.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE change MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0.

So what do I think so far? Well remember I did replace the original HD with a new one (Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s). So some improvements will be because of that...this isn't a scientific analysis.

Having said that, I ran all the tests on the original HD and never showed any thing unusual or any slower than average speeds.

So, the Vista with the old HD took about 3 to 3.5 minutes to boot to something useful...yes horribly slow...every step along the boot took a lot of time.

Win7 with the new drive boots to...

first sound (welcome screen) 43 sec.
login prompt (I swipe with the fingerprint scanner) 53 sec.
desktop is on internet (wifi) (skype plays login sound) 75 sec.

I don't care who you are...those are resonably fast times. It is fully useable by the time skype logs in.

Other things...quickly comes out of standby. No noticably difference in battery life.

Improvements...under Vista, when browsing my network, it took a couple of minutes to get enough info for me to actually browse...Vista took all that time just to populate the display...it doesn't take HD speed to browse the network.

Win7 pulls up the network devices and populates it with device icons as quickly as XP pulls up computers on the network.

When you reactivated the display after Vista turned it off, it would always come on full bright, no matter where it was set before...Win7 brings it back to the original brightness.

I have the same eyecandy settings that I had on Vista, and on this machine they are smooth and snappy...on VIsta they took a lot of effort it seemed.

Interesting to note, if you have the HD space, Win7 will create a 100meg system partition (like swap in linux?) I think that helps the speed.

So if you hate your Vista install then jump ship and get Win7.

I think I will get another copy and replace my aging XP install on my gaming/editing machine...or at least dual boot?

Kenwood D710 and Nuvi 350 usage.

So last time I showed the settings, this time I show what you get.Along the radios on the bottom row you see a row of labels. ALL of them have to do with APRS.
MSG is a list of inbound and outbound messages.
LIST is a list of other APRS stations...that you have received.
BCON is your radios APRS beacon setting (on or off)
POS is where the radio thinks you are...based on the last GPS input or your manual input.
P.MON monitors the position data your radio is getting/sending.

So if you push MSG, you get this screen.
I blurred out the callsigns to protect the innocent...the EMAIL ones are where I have attempted (and failed) to send out an EMAIL from the radio. the other ones are messages to and from the HT (TH-D7AG) . Note that you can reply or send new messages from this menu.

If you ESC out of that screen and go back to the main radio screen then select-
LIST. you get a listing of about 15 APRS stations the radio has received info from, either via relay or direct.So again I blurred out the callsigns, from here you can send messages also. Note the cursor is on the first entry, If I select this one (using the big knob again) I will get detail, location, info and a direction arrow.

Now to the Nuvi 350 using the GTRANS cable.

When you power the Nuvi up, you get this screen.
If you select Where To?...
...you get this screen, then select My Locations.
You see this...
now select Favorites.

At first this will probably be blank, but as your radio receives APRS info, it will populate this screen realtime.

It will sort the list from closest to furthest, and if I was moving it would show an arrow pointing to the location in addition to the distance.

I usually just leave the display on this page, and it is humorous when you pass by another APRS user going the other way on the interstate...

Or from the main menu you can select View Map.

It again automatically populates the maps with the APRS info. It doesn't matter if you have detail turned on or off, and you can zoom all the way in to 120mi out and still see the info.

Note, the Nuvi stores the info, so a APRS station will show, if it is currently online or not...but it's position will be updated if new info arrives...so you will have to compare this to the Radio list.















So that covers basic setup and usage. If I learn more, I may add or correct these pages.