After spending all that time getting ready, it was a pleasure to finally load all the Webcams up in the SUV and tote them out to the venue. This event was a big thing with the entire town of North Pole getting involved with lots of volunteers. Don and I went out on Tuesday to meet with the cable modem techs in our temporary computer room. We had been given permission to set up in the laundry room of the RV park. They are closed for the most part and only have one person staying at the park. The door has a code lock so we felt safe when we set up 3 computers, a cable modem, a router, and a hub. We met with the cable people and verified we had a signal, then on Thursday, we brought and set up the three computers with appropriate script for the cameras. Along with 26 cameras. Go to Ice Alaska You’ll be at site 27 with a view of how the cameras are installed on stands. Since they are all wifi enabled, all we had to do was set up two wifi receivers back at the RV park office laundry room where all our equipment was ready to receive the pictures, then upload the the pictures to the internet.
Thursday afternoon & Friday evening Don & I put up all the cameras. We had waited for the fences and security to be in place:
It seems that easy now, but Don, Rick and I spent from 6:30pm Friday to early Saturday morning getting everything to work.
Here’s Don & Rick working hard Friday night:
The entire system had been working at the Ice Park in Fairbanks when we moved it out to North Pole, but the change of routers and changing from DSL to a cable modem made the Linux box unhappy. It took until 4:30 AM to get it to accept the pictures from the cams and upload them to our host. Then the drive home was another 1/2 hour so I was happy to crawl into bed at 5:15am.
The Christmas In Ice event is a 38 mile round trip to my cabin so there was a definite need for remote computing. I spent a few hours reading up on it and then learned how to configure the Nexland router to allow remote desktop. The WinXP boxes at either end weren’t a big problem, but the Nexland turned out to be troublesome in an obscure way. Took me three round trips to get it working. Now I’m able to configure the webcams from home and have set up the Nexland to allow me to configure it remotely too, even if the LAN it’s connected to is down. Right now I’ve got the Camera Admin computer set to accept and allow remote computing but it won’t be that hard to get all of the boxes set up that way, even the Linux box will allow it.
On Saturday, we did some tweaking amidst the sculptors who were frantically trying to get their works done by Sunday at 3PM, ready for judging:
This star came out looking really good on the internet:
The fogginess of this set of pictures is due to the cold. It was around -5F while we were working out there and I had the camera in it’s padded case stuffed into an outside pocket of my winter coat. Turns out I need to keep it in an inside pocket to keep it warm.
This is a pretty good picture of the artist and eventual winner of the ice sculpture contest. The sculpture is of a prancing deer family and the style is retro from the 1930’s, I believe it’s called ‘rococo’:
Initially, we set up 24 cameras and got them working during the competition. Then on Monday (Dec. 10th) we shuffled some cameras around to show the winners and some shots of the park and the kids section while we left a static picture of the other works on the webserver. So when you go look at the webcams now, 11 are ‘live’ and the rest are from the archive (there are a couple cameras not transmitting just now but we’ll get that fixed soon, but it is a long drive just to unplug and replug in a camera).