http:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/?p=39<\/a>)<\/p>\nThe two small red lights in the bottom left indicate that the dryer is in its drying cycle, and that it’s on high heat.\u00a0 So all is well.\u00a0 You can’t see them, because they’re not illuminated, but there’re 8 warning lights in the camera’s view, so if anything bad happens one or more of those will light up and I’ll know something’s gone wrong.<\/p>\n
The dryer sits at my Mom and Dad’s house, about 5 miles from where I live.\u00a0 This web cam lets me keep an eye on the dryer from home.\u00a0 In years past there would always be a trip over to check on the dryer before going to bed.\u00a0 Now I can just browse to it from home.<\/p>\n
The web cam itself is a fairly inexpensive Linksys wireless camera.\u00a0 It’s not an outdoor camera.\u00a0 We only run the dryer about 3 weeks out of year.\u00a0 I couldn’t see going to the work and expense of a permanent weatherproof installation, at least until I knew this would work and be useful.\u00a0 I have the camera on a cheap tripod by the dryer with a baggie over the camera.<\/p>\n
The camera has audio, which is proving not to be useful.\u00a0 The dryer is very loud, but it’s a constant roar, and the camera seems to treat that as background noise and filter it out.<\/p>\n
The dryer sits about 190 feet from Mom and Dad’s house where the wireless access point is.\u00a0 See below.<\/p>\n
![\"Dryer](\"http:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/dryercam.jpg\")
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That was a little too far for the Linksys camera’s 802.11g network to connect to the wimpy Westell DSL modem\/wireless router, so I got a Netgear WiFi extender from the good people at A Plus Computers in Fort Wayne.\u00a0 That gave me a nice strong signal at 190 feet and I was up and running.\u00a0 The Linksys camera has a built in web server, so I just port forward it through the router at Mom and Dad’s house, set up a domain name for it through DynDns, and I can check the dryer from anywhere.<\/p>\n
I’m very happy with it as a proof of concept.\u00a0 I may go ahead and get an outdoor camera and mount it permanently.\u00a0 I’m still considering whether night vision would be good or bad.\u00a0 Being able to clearly see which indicator and warning lights are on in the dark may be more useful than night vision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The picture above may not look too exciting, but I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-farming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Night](\"http:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/dryercamsnapshot.jpg\")
<\/p>\n