Veo Observer Webcam
The Veo Observer webcam is a great piece equipment, incorporating a 640x480 full colour camera, microphone, remote pan, tilt and zoom control. It even contains its own web server!
Try it out at Acacia Cam.
This project will get you started on using this camera with any platform that supports Perl - including and in particular Linux!
Hardware
The camera is shown below.
You can obtain these in Australia from Caspian or you might like to visit the manufacturer .
Software
Making this device work with Windows is no problem as the built in web server (inside the camera) automatically installs an ActiveX control into your (IE5 only) browser for viewing the images and controlling the camera. There are also some applications supplied to setup login accounts and assign either a dynamic or static IP address to the camera.
The problem with the supplied software is that it only allows a single person to view and control the camera at any time. This project opens this up a little by allowing many people to view and control the camera by exposing the image and control via a web server. The image view and control is still on the basis of one person at a time, but no one person controls the camera for more time than is taken to perform the operation.
Full credit to Tobias Hoellrich for the Perl module and sample code to allow this to work.
Resources
Check out the following links for more items relating to Veo Observer
- Perl module: Tobias Hoellrich at Kahunaburger.
- Java code: James A. Russo at Halo3.
Ideas
- Of course you could save the expense of purchasing a camera if all your images are static and the only thing that changes is the lighting levels. Have a look at our webcam simulator called camify.
Code
This project helps you extend the use of the camera using Perl. For this you will need:
- A computer that has the latest version of Perl installed.
- The Veo Perl module.
- Sample Perl Script to snap some photos.
- The CGI script.
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