Tweek

RD-RC is having a IMAA big bird fly-in this weekend on Saturday october 17 at the Youngsville NC field. Those of you who are too far away to come to the fly-in can watch it on www.RDRC.tv . Check it out, if you can't make the flyin!

Dave

Chevelle

My Feedback: (2)

What a great setup! Can you share any details like the cameras you use, the streaming software, level of Internet service, etc.

Tweek

Sorry for the delay, I've not been on the forums much and missed your reply.

For the weather station, we're using a WMR-200 weather station from Oregon Scientific. The software for the interface between the weather station and the internet is called "Weather Display", and works with most weather stations. It's available for free for a while t allow you to test/playwith it. I display it on the pages at http://www.RDRC.tv via simple html.

The flightline and pit cams are just old junker webcams like those that sit on top of your PC for home use... I'm working with some better cams that were donated now, but the current video is from those cheapie $18-type webcams. I use Adobe FME (free) to encode the webcam feed and stream it to the web. I have the outgoing video stream set to 100k stream limits per cam, and stream only video (no audio). I send the video to uStream.com (free). I find that the average stream is only about 85k at our installation with the current settings. If you have a ho internet feed, you can use higher settings for even better quality.

I've learned a lot through trial and error... I'm not a computer echie-type, so this was a fun learning experience for me. I've made
several improvements that have reduced PC processor loading, making it easier to run on most any "junker" computer you can scrounge up. I'm still using a mix of standard issue 'cheapie' home webcams, and have only bought one new unit ($18, hehehehe). My efforts recently have been in reducing computer load, improving video framerate & quality, and minimizing internet requirements.

I currently have high speed DSL installed at the site to improve my ability to do other stuff and add more cams. I ran the initial setup on a Sprint "Air Card" for a couple of months while initially getting the bugs worked out, and it worked pretty good. Having limited upload banwidth via the aircard foced me to spend a lot of time tinkering with settings to minimize bandwidth while maintaining decent video stream quality, so that was also nt a bad thing.

I use two basic junker home PC's with USB ports for video cam inputs like those old HP Pavilion's that cost about $500 @ Walmart back around 2002. You can get them pretty much for free these days. I'd recommend a 2 ghz processor or more, if possible, to run the Adobe FME better. A laptop will work, but the USB bus power will probably limit you to 2 cams on most cheapie laptops. If the computers are really "junk", you can stack several of them (run a cam or two on each one), and tie them together into your internet feed with a simple hub. There's actually something positive to be said about running more than one old PC, because if one goes offline, you still have cams! That's what I have started doing, and like it better than trying to run everything on one old box.

One thing you have to remember with Windoz, though, you can only run one cam of each type/model on the same computer... IE, you can't run two cams exactly alike (same model) on the same box, as windows can't sort them out. That's a windows issue, but easy to work around by using different cams. There may be some way to use several camsof the same type, but I don't know ho to do it.

Tweek

Oh..by the way...we're having our spring fly-in at RDRC in Youngsville NC this coming weekend (4/17). If you're not able to make it, you can catch the action via our streaming field cams at http://www.RDRC.tv .

Dave

Stevembh

Hi Dave,

This very interesting. Any chance of putting your local time somewhere in the web site for those of us that are on the other side of the planet? I am very interested in your setup & am quite impressed by what you have achieved.

Steve

Tweek

Thanks for the feedback. The local time has been added to the pages at http://www.RDRC.tv now. It's just to the left of the weather dials.

Tweek

We're thinking about trying to switch the flight line cams to a singe, wide angle cam or lens. I'm working with a new commercial cam in my shop now, and it has a aux/acc lens attachment ring (whatever that's called) on the front. It would really lower the overhead on the system (and on the computers of the users) to drop from 3 cams to 1 cam on the flight line, while being able to see all 5 flight stations.

Anyone have experience with a good, yet inexpensive video cam that might work in this application (need composite video or USB output) that has good quality and a wide angle view?