Webcam on a Raspberry Pi 3?

[Steve Dulmes]

Hello, 

My Acurite 5in1 is working well reporting to the Weather Underground through my RPi 3. I have the Pi connected to the weather station base with a USB cable. Does the Pi have enough power to handle a webcam hooked up through the Pi's wifi? Any suggestions for a good, reasonably prices wifi webcam?

Thanks for the help,

Steve D.

[Bill Morrow]

Steve, I have been successfully using a version 1 Raspberry Pi camera as a web cam on a Pi model B for a few years now. These parts live within a cheap ebay fake security camera. Eventually I plan to close up the camera, weather proof it and mount it outside. Heat will be a problem in the summer time.

The Pi is also a gateway for weather data coming from a remote station to weewx. It handles the two loads just fine. Typical CPU load is under 10%.

I am using mmal_motion to capture motion seen by the camera. The captured images are written to a remote file system mounted via samba, to reduce wear and tear on the Pi's SD card. I have worn out one SD card. It lasted a little over a year. So I should put more effort in to reducing writes to the file system.

[Steve Dulmes]

Thanks, Bill. I am not tech savvy enough to understand everything you said, but it sounds like it should work for me. I appreciate your time in answering this. I will check out eBay and see what they have.

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Steve Dulmes

Hingham, WI

[vince]

On Sunday, February 5, 2017 at 6:13:59 PM UTC-8, Steve Dulmes wrote:

My Acurite 5in1 is working well reporting to the Weather Underground through my RPi 3. I have the Pi connected to the weather station base with a USB cable. Does the Pi have enough power to handle a webcam hooked up through the Pi's wifi? Any suggestions for a good, reasonably prices wifi webcam?

Ummm - this isn't remotely weewx related.

That said, any wifi cam will work.   You might want to read the forums at https://ipcamtalk.com or https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/new/ for more info. 

[Andrew Milner]

That's a bit harsh Vince - many people use a webcam to supply weather images for use on their weewx generated webpages ..... and the webcam capture may have to co-exist with the  weewx weather station capture and subsequent data processing.  Certainly some time ago I found that my original RPi just could not cope with weewx and a high quality webcam - factors which I suspect are now different with the RPi3 being around.  Alternatively it may be necessary to have the webcam capture take place from a different processor and just make the captured image be available to weewx.

[vince]

On Monday, February 6, 2017 at 11:47:35 AM UTC-8, Andrew Milner wrote:

That's a bit harsh Vince - many people use a webcam to supply weather images for use on their weewx generated webpages ..... and the webcam capture may have to co-exist with the  weewx weather station capture and subsequent data processing.  Certainly some time ago I found that my original RPi just could not cope with weewx and a high quality webcam - factors which I suspect are now different with the RPi3 being around.  Alternatively it may be necessary to have the webcam capture take place from a different processor and just make the captured image be available to weewx.

Disagree, I made a point to reply to the original poster with two more relevant sites with lots of data on what to buy (or not buy).

Hooking up a webcam to weewx depends on what you mean by that.  If you mean embed a periodic snapshot in your templates, that's easy.  If you mean a 1080p realtime webcam feed, that's not something you likely want to do over wifi on your network at all, regardless of what computer you run weewx on.  It would just eat up your wifi simply monitoring the feed (I know, I run a wifi security cam at super low-res to a computer on my LAN that monitors ala 'zoneminder' or 'motion' would on Linux, and simply doing the monitoring chews the heck out of the wifi network).  

You almost always want realtime feeds 'wired' over the network, or 'local' via USB connected to the computer running the software monitoring the camera.

But for snapshots, wifi works just fine.  Hit a url on the camera via cron periodically.  No load on the runtime computer or network at all.