Alright, so after day one of trial runs with FFMPEG, the feed, the stream, and the crons that cycle it, I’m pleased to officially announce LizardCam! It’s no secret that I keep a bearded dragon (Chopstick) for a pet, and I’m extremely proud to show her off to the world! She’s kinda the mascot of this website even. You can find a link on my home page to the LizardCam, and I’ll put in a link at the end of this post as well.
So, now to set forth how the LizardCam will work. Since the webcam is technically broadcasting from my bedroom, I’m only going to run the cam while I’m awake. For now, the tentative schedule is going to be 13:00p CDT through to 19:00p CDT every day of the week. Currently, I’ve configured the cam to cycle once every 20 minutes. On the 19th, 39th, and 59th minute of every hour the stream will shut down. On the 1st, 21st, and 41st minute of the hour, the stream will power back on. I’m doing this to make sure that the system remains fresh throughout the long time that I’m going to be keeping it online, and I’m also doing this to test my skills in configuring cron jobs and scripts and what not.
There is always a chance that the cam will go down. Earlier today I was running the cam, and it seemed to work well for a few hours before the computer simply stopped recognizing it. Since I work throughout the day, I wasn’t able to address this problem until I got home later in the evening. If the cam goes down, no worries! I’ll just get home and get to work on resolving the problem.
Also, the cam tends to lag behind real time after a few minutes. If you see that the stream has frozen up, or if you would like to keep apprised of Chopstick’s live movements, just refresh your browser. 🙂
Enjoy the cam everyone! I’m really proud of this one, and I hope that it works well!