Oodles of stuff..

After a bit of a tech hiatus ( details elsewhere), I'm happy to say that I'm back inside my text editor writing code, refreshing those bits of memory where clever structures reside. It's just as well I keep such good notes.

I've gotta get me AutoIt muscles flexed for a checksum update, amongst many, many other things, and so I set about writing a wee app for my new IP Camera..

If you haven't gotten the IP Camera buzz yet, I recommend you get along to eBay. Modern IP Cameras are incredibly cheap and amazingly feature-packed, thanks mainly to their embedded Linux systems (and Eastern manufacture!). It's common to find the most meager cam supporting Wireless (and being Linux, the Wi-Fi comes with WPA2 as standard) as well as Ethernet connexions out of the box. Then there's built-in motion-detection with alarms and/or email alerts, scheduled FTP uploading, Automatic DDNS login, built-in PPPOE and other ISP login capabilities, infrared night-vision, two-way audio, full PTZ capabilities, automatic patrolling and much more for less than the price of a half-decent meal.

Of course, these capabilities are for nothing if there's no way to control them, so like many network enabled devices around today, these webcams come with a Web Interface, something you can get to with any "standard" web browser, which invariably means Internet Explorer.

The makers of IP cameras put a relatively large amount of effort into these CGI interfaces, and compared to the truly awful viewer program that often come with such devices, not to mention most of the expensive applications available to operate your camera, these web interfaces are quite pleasant to use; simple and fairly resource-friendly. Well, mine is, and that's what I wrote OodleCam for..

As I see it the only downside of my IP camera's web interface, is that I need to run it in a web browser. Its server-push mode (Firefox/Chrome/etc.) is quite dire (they devote more resources to their IE versions, no doubt), which means either running an IETab inside Firefox, which I find inconvenient, or else running actual Internet Explorer with all its toolbars and menus and buttons and screen real estate gobbled up to display my camera's simple interface in the middle.

I mused.. Wouldn't it be better to have a window with ONLY the camera's interface and nothing else? And wouldn't it be nice to move that huge company logo out of the way, and so on.. And so OodleCam was born. That's all it is, a specialized browser window for your camera's web interface. No buttons, no dials, no menus, no toolbars, just the web interface and nothing else.

And then, inevitably, I added lots of other features I figured would be handy, multiple camera setups, scheduled reboot (as well as any other command you desire to send on a schedule), keypad PTZ control and so on.

A beta version is available, so if you have a Foscam FI8908W or FI8918W Wireless IP Camera; or one of the many many clones, Tenvis 3815, indeed, any camera that has a web interface and uses the standard camera control set; check it out here..

OodleCam..

The OodleCam page is quite basic, for now; in my grand effort to overcome perfectionism I aim to more put stuff out as-is and let you enjoy my playing around with it as-I-go, documentation included, actually, some of this text here looks handy …

Okay, that's it, yet another IP Cam viewer in the world.

for now..

;o)