kahunaburger

In Big brother watching over little sister I mentioned a primitive motion detection application that grabs frames from the wireless network camera in Pia’s nursery and publishes them through (a secret page on) KahunaBurger. I’ve got a number of requests for details about this application. Here they are …
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You have to be a die-hard-Pia-fan to see this entry - others don’t even bother, you won’t understand why a few photos of a little baby can bring so much joy.
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In “Deconstructing the Veo Observer Net Camera” I showed a simple program that uses the Veo SDK to grab a snapshot from the camera and store it in a JPG file. Since I posted this information I received numerous requests from people to help them to compile the software and make it work in their environment. I decided to change the tool slightly and post the binary for this updated tool. You can download it here: veo.zip (~ 150 KBytes)

The zip-file contains the veo.exe program plus all required DLLs. The source directory in the zip-file also contains the sources for the tool. A number of command line options are required to configure the snapshot tool. Most importantly the “-i” option will tell the tool where to find the Veo Observer Camera (IP-address or hostname of the camera).
Here are all options:

c:\tmp> veo.exe
Usage: veo -i <veo ip address> [-s <veo port> -u <veo user> -p <veo password>] <output file>
  -i specifies the ip-address/hostname of the Veo Observer Camera
  -s specifies the port-number for the Veo Observer Camera (default 1600)
  -u allows to pass the username for camera access (default 'admin')
  -p allows to specify the password for camera access (default 'password')
  -v verbose
The output file will hold a 640x480 JPEG snapshot from the camera after successful execution.
If you have questions/comments, please contact tobias-at-kahunaburger.com
c:\tmp>


So, if your Veo is configured for IP-address 192.168.1.200 and you changed the username to “veo” with password “secret”, you would use the following command to get a snapshot in file “snapshot.jpg”:

c:\> veo.exe -i 192.168.1.200 -u veo -p secret snapshot.jpg

Update 6/16/2004: Werner Kraemer is using the executable above to capture images from his Veo camera on a regular basis. Those images then end up for friends/family on his personal web site. He sent the following email to me with some details on how to enhance the qualiy of the Veo snapshots:

Hi Tobias,

I have in the meantime installed an ‘image sharpener’. This may be of interest to you and your website community:

With the image being captured at 640×480 I assume that that everyone agrees that the image is not of the best quality. Driven by this quality issue I looked for command line executable image sharpening routine which I found at www.imagemagick.com. They provide a FREE image manipulation system with many routines including sharpening. The input parameters are convolution kernel radius and sigma (full control over the resulting image sharpness).

With these imagemagick modules stored in the directory of the same name. I constructed a batch file ‘veo.bat’ and collocated it in the same directory (important since the dll references will work in that configuration)

Here are the steps executed in veo.bat:

1) c:\veo\veo.exe -i 192.168.1.103 -u admin -p password c:\a.jpg
I am calling your routine

2) convert.exe -sharpen 3×2 c:\a.jpg c:\a.jpg
then execute the convert routine from ImageMagick with the ’sharpen’
directive

3) convert.exe +raise 10×10 c:\a.jpg c:\a.jpg
and for a little trivia fanciness the image outline is framed

Then I went into the Windows XP scheduler (under the Accessories > Systems
Tools > Scheduled Tasks and generated a scheduled call to the veo.bat file every 10 minutes. On my website (hosted on my home computer) www.wormatia.com I can now display a reasonable looking image to my family in Germany overlooking the view from the back of my house overlooking the valley.

This view has its own problems since the sky is generally brighter than the lower foreground the camera’s imaging sensor saturates and yield a vertically btreaking image in bright sunlight. I will let you know of the results of my next project - designing an inexpensive gradient filter to minimize the sky effect.

I hope this was interesting enough to read.

Best Regards
Werner Kraemer

Thanks Werner!

Update 8/12/2004: Finally I have a perl module that allows capturing the images from the Veo Observer Network Camera on any platform. See this entry.

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If this is really true (see Slashdot story) then I believe this is going to be a historic partial screenshot of the Slashdot home-page:

Wow …

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Let me know, if you feel like it …

Tree in the snow

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If there was a competition for babies wrapping their parents around their fingers, this one would go to the World Championship and would still win …

Thinking

 

Candice doing the nose thing

 

Wondering

Daddy’s sweat shirt

 

Daddy’s sweat shirt

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Pia seems to like Music. Whenever you turn on the CD-player, radio or stream radio stations to the TV, she listens up and seems to enjoy the fact that she hears something different than “Oh - you’re sooo darn cute!”.

Well, daddy listens to Intenet radio stations on his PC every now and then (http://www.somafm.com/ and http://www.swissgroove.ch/ for example). Those Internet radio stations “stream” their program over the network and an application like Winamp (see http://www.winamp.com/) will decode the information and turn it back into music on your computer. Winamp (and other audio players) also has a “Visualization” mode. In this mode a piece of software will interpret the sounds and will try to visualize the audio in the weirdest ways on the screen by forming rhythmic, color-changing patterns and shapes. Those patterns and shapes seem to feel the groove and it is interesting to see audio and visual stimulation go hand in hand. Ryan Geiss is one of the heroes, who developed numerous visualization plugins for Winamp and among them Milkdrop, which seems to be Pia’s favorite.

Well, a few weeks ago I switched on the “Visualization” while Pia was sitting on my lap in front of the computer. She was mesmerized and could not stop staring at the patterns, colors and shapes, while listening to the music. Since then we’ve tried it several times and even when the baby has one of the fuss-attacks this is a guaranteed way to make her shut up and be happy again.

And here she is, sitting on my lap, staring at the screen. The photo is surrounded by some of the things she saw while she was staring at the screen:

Pia watches Winamp visualizations

And before you ask: Yes, we limit the amount of time she spends in front of the system…

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You’ve read about it elsewhere: Janet Jackson’s nipple slip during the Super Bowl half-time show. CBS and MTV claim it was an accident and Mike Powell starts an official FCC investigation because:

“That celebration was tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt,” Powell said in a statement that was echoed by others on the panel. “Our nation’s children, parents and citizens deserve better.”

An FCC probe because of a (nicely decorated) nipple during the half-time show? Give me a break. It was barely visible and only because the media immediately jumped on the story and offered frame grabs in HDTV resolution, we really know what happened. Is this going to cause a traumatic experience for all those kids who watched the show? I don’t think so. I would prefer that my kid saw a nipple-slip instead of one of the 200+ people killed in R-rated movies that were on at the same time.

Granted it was all planned (you can tell from the way that Janet and Justin behaved) and the fact that mtv.com had reported earlier on (http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1484644/20040128/index.jhtml?headlines=true) about some “Shocking Moments” during Janet Jackson Super Bowl performance (the first mtv.com link magically disappeared from the mtv.com site, however mtvasia.com still has the story up here and it is also referenced on E!Online here - mtvasia.com’s version has also been cached by Google under this link [just in case it also magically disappears]).

Everywhere else in this world people would just go over this incident and it would barely make the head-lines of some third-class news sources, but here in the States it causes an outrage that is beyond my comprehension. What’s America’s problem with the nipple?

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