CloudCam problems

The first day of testing the camera more or less worked and, unsurprisingly, over night all that was shown was a black square. However, this morning, it's not worked very well at all.

Yesterday I initially started using a tool called streamer to grab the images from the camera. When I had it set up in the office, pointing in the office, it worked fine. However, when I had it looking out of the window I mostly got a blank, white image. I then added a delay (this can be supplied on the command line) to give the camera time to adjust its brightness levels and that more or less worked. But, even then, I'd get the occasional white-out image.

I then decided to have a look around and see if I could find a different command line based tool for grabbing an image. vgrabbj was my next choice. This appeared to work rather well and it produced good images without the need for a delay. It also seemed to be a better choice because it provides a method of adding a timestamp to the image itself.

This morning, from just after sunrise, it's also been producing mostly white-out images too. It also has a parameter that causes a delay in grabbing the image and so I've made use of that. Even then the camera still seems to be having problems adjusting to the light levels. Chances are the problem all comes down to it being an old camera.

I'll carry on playing with it for a short while longer but, at the moment, the current setup isn't looking too promising.

File Under: Weather, Clouds, Sky Camera, Cloud Camera, WebCam.