[clug] day/night webcam

[Francis Whittle]

Use a photo-chromatic (aka Transitions™) lens?

On a more serious note, you could try putting a section of toilet roll
on it to act as a lens hood, blocking out light with a high angle of
incidence, but if you're poking it out a window (assuming it's a closed
window) the glass probably your biggest problem in the daytime (again
because of light coming in at the sides).  There's a chance you'll be
able to solve this by adding a wider 'hood' outside the glass, but
there's a the problem of total internal reflection still, and the most
robust solutions would be to either have a polarising sheet
(ridiculously expensive) or put together an outdoor enclosure for the
webcam, including hood (somewhat less expensive).  It's unlikely you'll
find a webcam with appropriate aperture adjustment (software corrections
will never deal with this) except for purpose built security cameras,
that tend to come with their own network centres with proprietary motion
detection software and web servers, making them way too expensive if
you're not using them for their intended purpose.

On Fri, 2010-09-17 at 18:22 +1000, Hal Ashburner wrote:
> Hey Clug,
> 
> I want to point a webcam out of my window at the, ahem, outside world. 
> The 'motion' program is what I'm using with some recent species of 
> quickcam. Now this works great, at night, when it's a bit dark, the 
> lights show up just grand. During the day it tends to respond in a 
> similar manner to me when encountering direct sunlight by simply saying 
> "sod this" and refusing to work properly. Ok so like me I can strap 
> sunnies to it and it starts to show how it might behave reasonably. 
> Problem then is that it isn't Corey Heart and so it doesn't like the 
> whole sunnies at night thing*.
> 
> Any ideas? Seen it before?
> Wrong webcam? Use brand xxx model yyy instead?
> Some magic v4l setting I don't know about that will adjust between day 
> and night?
> Two webcams, one with sunnies, one without? eww
> Give up and grow potatoes for fun instead?
> 
> Hal
> 
> *Apologies to the kids for music references from deep into last century, 
> but hey, the 80s are back! Get on board with a narrow tie today!