Set Up Fwink:
After installing Fwink, run it from the "Start" menu. You might not
see anything at first. You'll need to configure it. Click on
"Settings..." to configure Fwink.
The first configuration page you'll see is the "File Transfer" page
(see photo below). Enter the FTP information in the field provided. If
you have a web hosting service, you can get the FTP information from
your host provider. You can also disable FTP if you don't want to send
the image remotely. In that case, you'd probably want to enable "Save
images to a file".
I kept my capture interval at 1 minute; you can change it to as
often as you like. Just keep your network bandwidth and traffic in
mind.
After configuring the "File Transfer" page, click on the "Video
Capture" tab. You'll end up at the "Video Capture" settings page (see
photo below).
If you only have one video capturing device attached, then that's
the default video device. If you have multiple imaging devices, you can
click the "Change Device..." button to pick the one you want to use.
But if no devices show up, then it means you haven't installed a video
capturing device. In that case, to back to installing the video device
before continuing.
You can also change the standard size for your images. Just keep in
mind that the larger the image, the longer it take to transfer over the
network. You will also eat up a lot more bandwidth, depending on your
capturing interval.
When you are done with the settings, click "Apply" and then "OK".
You'll need to restart Fwink for some settings to become effective.
Set Up the Web PageOnce Fwink is running, and is successfully
uploading images to the web server, it's time to build a web page to
display the image and automatically refresh. To teach you how to write
web pages would take a whole book and is out of the scope for this
article. So in this article, I will present a simple web page that only
displays the image and includes the code to automatically refresh. You
can customize it to your liking. The following is a simple
"index.html" file for you to place in your web cam image directory.
<html>
<head>
<title>WebCam</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="60; URL=index.html">
</head>
<body bgcolor="black" text="white" link="yellow" vlink="red">
<center>
<h1>WebCam</h1>
<img src="webcam.jpg" width="640" height="480">
</center>
</body>
</html>
The web page above refresh the browser every minute (60 seconds).
You can change that value by changing the "META" line. You can also
change the color scheme anyway you like. To change the size of the
image shown on the web page, change the width and height settings.
View the Web Cam:
To view the web cam, simply direct any web browser to the web page. The
URL depends on the domain name, or IP address, of your server and the
directory you put the web page in. If you have a web hosting service,
their tech support can help you figure out how to see your web page.
Archive Sequencial Images:
Fwink doesn't allow you to save the images by time. You can only give
it one name. But since I send the image over the a Linux server and
it's really easy to write UNIX shell scripts, I decided to write my own
software that archives the sequence of images. I am distributing the
software under GPL, so you can use them for your own purposes. Please
see the following two web pages on the software and how to run it on
your own computer.
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