Kludged Centinal

So I was digging through my home workspace and came across 2 webcams I've had for a long time now:

1. Rocket Fish 2.omp
2. Veho Mico Camcorder (has a camcorder via usb feature)

I've been playing around with the idea of creating a super simple home surveillance system for a while now and it finally struck me how to do it.

Let's say, hypothetically, you're place of employment has a lot of restrictions on what you can access on the internet - for example going as far as to block nearly all blogs - including this one. If you wanted to get around that, and you had another computer connected to the internet at home, then you could use a desktop sharing program to access that computer and surf remotely. I stumbled across just such a program:

logmein.com

It is a super simple, browser based program that takes no time to install (on the host PC) and use.

I realized if I hooked all my webcams up to the my Acer AspireOne netbook, and remotely logged on I view my home through the netbook's webcam (hard mounted just above the screen) and my two additional webcams. To view multiple webcams at once, I opened up Skype and went under "tools" to "video settings" and simply cycled through the two additional webcams. the AspireOne has a preinstalled program for viewing through its own webcam.

This was cool, but not satisfying enough. I wanted to be able to scan the room 360 degrees, eliminating gaps in coverage. I mounted the rocketfish onto a continuous rotation servo motor(, anchored the base to a small wooden box - filled with dominos for stability, and ran the control wires back to an arduino. I 'wrote' (copied pieces of code) an arduino script that listens to the serial monitor for a number and drives the servo using the following numbers for directions:

• right (1)
• left (2)
• stop (0)

The code pulses the servo in 'steps' for the given direction or sets the servo to the zero position for 'stop'. It took me some time to calibrate the servo, but once I got it dialed in (using the small adjustment screw on the bottom) it worked great.

Start to finish, I kludged this system together in a couple of hours one night. Since then my free trial period of LogMeIn has expired. Does anyone have any suggestions of other programs I could use?

Arduino code below:

#include

Servo myservo;

void setup()

{

myservo.attach(9);

myservo.write(90); // set servo to mid-point

Serial.begin(9600);

Serial.println("...starting");

}

void loop() {

byte val;

if(Serial.available()) {

val = Serial.read();

if (val == '1') {

Serial.println("Move Right");

myservo.write(180);

delay(100);

myservo.write(90);

}

else if (val == '2') {

Serial.println("Move Left");

myservo.write(0);

delay(100);

myservo.write(90);

}

else if (val == '0') {

Serial.println("Stop");

myservo.write(90);

}

myservo.write(90);}

}