The Nest is located in ivy growing on the side of our house. I am able to site a USB webcam in the ivy, and get a lead back into the house. As the cable lengths for USB are restricted this is quite difficult.
The camera is a 3Com Home Connect which I have wrapped in cling film, although it is pretty well protected from the elemnts by the ivy. I have found this camera to be extremely good value, producing pictures that are as better in the low light conditions than any other..
The webcam is connected to a PC running Webcam32. This is an excellent piece of software that will take a shot whenever there is change in the image and keep the last few shots. (few can be anything from 1 to 1000 – I have chosen to make the last 20 available) These shots are saved on a local disc and on our server (yes we have a small network in our home) At the same time a copy of the image is saved to disc. This gives a large numbe of images!!
The shots are occasionally uploaded to the public server ( where you are viewing them), via a perl script that creates the smaller images and compresses the larger ones.