With the recent temporary addition of a second child dog, we decided it might be fun to install a webcam so we can watch them from work. During the summer, the dogs stay in the house because it's too hot outside for Bruno (Pugs have trouble cooling off due to their smashed-in faces). Lito (the Yellow Lab) has a bad habit of knocking down barriers and getting into anything that may contain food. He doesn't destroy our stuff, just gets into food. So we have to shut them in a room where they can sleep and stay out of trouble.

Riveting, isn't it?

So the other day I bought a Panasonic BL-C10A network camera. For the price, its features can't be beat:

• 10/100 Ethernet (no computer needed, just plug into the network)
• Good quality low-light images
• Built-in web server
• Customized user access control
• Movie or still image output, up to 640x480
• Remote pan and tilt

To get the remote pan and tilt in another camera, I'd have to pay about $100 more to start (to be fair, those cameras also have audio, which this one doesn't; but we didn't want that). This feature rocks - if something's out of the frame, just click on the image and the camera moves to recenter. Or send it to one of 8 positions that you can preset. Awesome.

The built-in web server also rocks. The means no special software is required to access the data - just any web browser. Their built-in CGI app is pretty good, but of course I wanted to customize access and data display. Panasonic provides a technical PDF on their site documenting every possible command that you can use to roll your own interface. Excellent! (and far better documentation than most of its competitors)

I wrote a simple perl script that periodically grabs an image from the camera and saves it to my PC. Using this, I can create my own front page for the camera images, and I can also use another program I wrote to detect motion and save only the "interesting" frames. Nice. So now it's ready for public access so anyone -- even complete strangers -- can waste away the hours watching our dogs sleep. Right?

Well, not quite. Currently we leave the dogs in our bedroom. Of the other two bedrooms in the house, one has all of our "hobby" stuff (computers, musical instruments, art supplies, etc). The dogs are very good about not destroying anything valuable, but do we really want to take that chance? The other bedroom is usually the hottest room in the house. It gets baked by direct sunlight in the morning and its vent is last in the duct system, so it gets the least air conditioning.

So right now there's a camera in our bedroom. The same room where we sleep, shower, get dressed, etc. Uhhh. Hmm.

The camera allows you to set what days of the week and times of the day that it's accessible. Outside of these times, only the admin user can access the image. Ok, good. So set it for when we're gone at work -- say, 9am to 7pm, Monday through Friday. But what if I sleep in and get out of the shower at 9:15? What about days we take off from work? Well, the camera also has a privacy button where nobody can see anything while it's set. But what if we forget to push it?

I can also control access from the PC, which hosts the simple front page I put together. Plus, it's the firewall, so I can always shut off the port that's forwarded to the camera when necessary. Sounds like a lot of hassle, and easy to forget. One "oops" could be rather publicly embarrassing.

We're not quite ready to start charging $29.95 per month for access to the BedroomCam, so until we figure out a better arrangement, PuppyCam access remains completely private. Sorry!