WebCam

A webcam based on AMIGA M-JPEG digitizer hardware and a collection of scripts to upload the images to an FTP account.

Main Window

This project was an attempt to build a webcam from existing hardware, since professional webcams were very expensive at the time.

• Hi8 video camera
• Amiga 4000
• VLab Motion, a Motion-JPEG digitizer card
• Parallel port connection (PC2Amiga) to the PC
• Windows PC
• AOL ‘50 hours free’ internet access

The video camera is connected to the digitizer board on the Amiga. The digitizer software is controlled by an ARexx script that takes a picture every five seconds and sends it via the PC2Amiga client over the parallel port to the PC. On the PC, a VisualBasic application using the Inet ActiveX control uploads the file to an Internet FTP account. On the server, a cron job moves the uploaded file to a folder on a web server, where it can be viewed in a browser.

Apart from the occasional partially uploaded file and several restarts of the various scripts, the webcam worked quite nicely.