KitsKam

So when I started the kitskam project I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to run an extremely high resolution webcam. The kitskam is 8 megapixels (i think). I think there are only a handful of webcams in the world that match that resolution. I had to create the software to run a DSLR at a timed interval etc etc.

The site gets lots of traffic and does fairly well. Unfortunately, it’s not very stable and when I’m traveling (and other people are running it) it goes down and I can’t fix it because physical manual intervention is involved. (the camera itself crashes!)

In the future I plan to make it far more stable and probably way lower resolution. Turns out nobody cares about the high quality of the image but me and some other dorks.

Anyway, it’s not going away for now but I thought I’d post an update and say sorry for all the downtime…

As you may know the original @kitskam camera died the other day. It had a pretty incredible life. It traveled through 20 or 30 countries with @jonrawlinson before it was ‘retired’ and donated to become the kitskam camera. Once the Kitskam camera was ‘retired’ as a normal camera it was put into service as the kitskam webcam. It clicked away taking a photo every 30 seconds for roughly 1 year. An impressive feat given that’s more than 10x the number of photos a little camera like that was supposed to be able to handle.

Here are some amazing images @jonrawlinson took with it before it was the kitskam camera:

photo by my brother: Jon Rawlinson

photo by my brother: Jon Rawlinson

photo by my brother: Jon Rawlinson

photo by my brother: Jon Rawlinson

R.I.P. Kitskam camera 1

Here is a preview screenshot of the new fancy pants Kitskam software that we’re working on. This software will allow you to connect a DSLR to your mac via usb and take photos that will be automatically uploaded to Amazon S3. It’s going to be free, open source, and Mac based. I was going to sell this software but decided it would be better for the community to give it away. That way people can make their own Kitskam… Follow @kitskam on Twitter for updates.

The other night was the Celebration of Light 2009 Team China fireworks display in Vancouver, Canada. For the last little while I’ve been running the KitsKam webcam and I’ve been live video streaming the fireworks online. For the the previous few nights we went up on the roof and I manually controlled the cameras and the equipment in person. The other night was different. We decided we wanted watch the fireworks from the beach. The problem was I still wanted to stream it live.

What to do….?! I setup all the gear, laptop, still camera, video camera, and 2 tripods a couple hours before the show and started the live video stream. Then we cruised down to the beach on our bikes to watch the fireworks. Of course technology being what it is, the laptop on the roof kept crashing and the live stream kept flaking out. I figured this would happen so I brought a separate laptop down to the beach as well. I then remotely logged into the laptop back at home on the roof by tethering my laptop over bluetooth with the iPhone 3G. By using an application called Log Me In I had complete control of the laptop on the roof back at home. So I was able to monitor the live stream and stills completely remotely. I could even reboot it if need be. It was pretty fun to be in the chat room.

So now you know why it was so hard for me to troubleshoot the feed at the time given the tethering etc.

It was surely the geekiest thing I’ve ever done. Oh and I was taking still photographs down at the beach while this was all going on which you can see here.

I put together a new blog for the KitsKam! Just getting it up and running!