Author Topic: Weather Cams & Wunderground?  (Read 2144 times)

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Offline SkellyCA

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Weather Cams & Wunderground?
« on: September 30, 2018, 11:23:31 AM »
In order to upload weather cam image to Wunderground, what do I need?

A special Camera?
Special Software?
What is a good camera?

So how is this done and what is it done with?
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up to much room.

Offline SkellyCA

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Re: Weather Cams & Wunderground?
« Reply #1 on: October 08, 2018, 09:01:20 PM »
Will this camera work?

Lorex 8MP 4K IP Bullet Security Camera LNB8921BW, 250ft IR Night Vision

Do I need any special software?
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up to much room.

Offline jbeale

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Re: Weather Cams & Wunderground?
« Reply #2 on: November 09, 2018, 02:21:14 PM »
I'm planning to try this out soon myself. You need a camera that can either send an image (JPEG) via FTP to the wunderground site, or you need to have it publish the image online at some http URL, either directly or through a remote site, and then have wunderground fetch it from there.  Most IP security cameras have an option to send an image to a remote host via FTP (either at regular intervals, or in response to a motion alert) but sometimes configuring that can be tricky. Every unit is different, in my experience.

https://www.wunderground.com/webcams/signup.html#addcam
FTP Method: FTP will allow you to update your images a little more frequently (up to once a minute), but it will require you to send us the images.
URL Method: URL makes Weather Underground do all the hard work, but may update a little less frequently.

Offline Fast351

  • Amateur weather geek
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    • Lake Mary MN Weather Page
Re: Weather Cams & Wunderground?
« Reply #3 on: February 05, 2019, 11:46:05 AM »
Will this camera work?

Lorex 8MP 4K IP Bullet Security Camera LNB8921BW, 250ft IR Night Vision

Do I need any special software?

Lorex makes great cameras.  I have an 8 channel NVR with 6 cameras hooked up.  I use two of them for my weather website.  But it's not a trivial setup.  I'm a software developer, so I can "create" stuff where there is a void. 

Basically I have an FTP server app running on my LAN that catches the images from my NVR (although I believe the IP cameras themselves can be configured to upload to an FTP server without an NVR).  The upload rate is configurable but it's pretty fast, I think the slowest you can go is every 10 seconds.  Could probably find a freeware FTP server to run locally to do this.

Then every few minutes it pushes the pictures to my website.  You could probably use a task running every few minutes and use a command line command to push them to your webserver.  It also reduces the size to WUs standard and pushes it to their FTP server.  Not sure how you would do that with available software although I'm sure it could be done. 

WU is abandoning their webcam platform.  I'm pretty sure that the "make us go look at your website" feature no longer works, and their FTP server is intermittent. 

But basically the procedure for a Lorex IP cam is this:

CAM->Local FTP Server->Resize to <150K->FTP to WU