Webcam Update

The weather station has been mostly on auto-pilot for several months now.  I do still check the logs and keep an eye on things, but it hasn’t required any real intervention on my part.  I’ll consider that a good thing as my attention has been focused elsewhere for the last few months.  The only real issue I was having with the weather station was the webcam software.  I had begun experiencing periodic lockups of the software where the image was no longer being captured or uploaded to my web site.  I had been using a trial version of Conquercam, which is not free software, so it was time to either pay up or find an alternative.

In the past I had looked at several free webcam packages.  My favorite had been Yawcam.  I don’t remember all the details, but I remember I abandoned that software because I was having to unplug and plug in the webcam fairly often to reset the driver.  My server had a fairly fresh install of Windows Server 2012 Essentials, so when Conquercam began having issues I decided to give Yawcam another chance.  I’m happy to say that Yawcam has performed quite well for me since I switched back to it.  It also has the advantage of being able to provide better streaming support.  For Conquercam I was using a page that refreshed the image every second rather than doing actual streaming.  Yawcam provides a Web page with fairly decent streaming support. So for now I’m a Yawcam user again.  It’s been running for several weeks now without a hitch.  I’ll continue to keep an eye on it and report back here if I have any problems with the software.