Tip: Want to use your webcam as a vera camera?

Okay,
A month ago in the midst of another "vera zwave meltdown"TM, I had a sudden urge to make a media center connected webcam into a vera camera.

Admit it . . .it happens to all of us . . .you know you want to try it. . .

So while vera was busy melting down (another fifteen minute firmware upgrade that doesn’t ever stop upgrading until you yank the power, and then recreate your findvera user name and password so you can login again) I went off on the interweb to do some research.

I am sure there are many ways to pull this off, but this one worked for me and is free unless you wish to donate to the freeware author.

After trying numerous commercial webcam programs that basically do the same thing. (The commercial programs all lock you into a subscription service in exchange for turning your computer into their proprietary internet image server.) I found a pretty talented programmer that wrote a freeware app called Yawcam. Yawcam is actually very impressive.

Getting Vera to work with a pc webcam:

Install Yawcam. Configure it for http serving. In this mode it will generate a jpg web page. Then edit the default web page that yawcam generates for you to remove everything but the .jpg file (I used notepad to open the html file and have almost zero html experience). Then use the LUUP module of vera to create a camera (follow the crazy wikipedia instructions for setting up a camera for vera), point vera to the ip address/port that yawcam is serving from (it will be the ip of the computer that the webcam is attached to with a port address on the end ie: 192.168.1.159:88888). Presto. . .vera camera. It sounds a little complicated, but actually yawcam has a great website and is an impressive piece of software.

Important: Also remember to make sure your router firewall is not setup to port forward that ip/port or your webcam will be visible to the internet as a whole. Yawcam even has a built in test to see if your camera is visible from the internet if your not sure your firewall is blocking it.

This little trick will allow you have access to the wonders of vera camera. . .also known as one frame every five seconds. . .enjoy.

Regards.