At 3/31/2001
05:47 PM, you wrote:
For a while I had a parallel port webcam running of a 386sx20 with 4MB
of RAM and it ran Windows 95. While it was slow it did get the job
done. The machine has since been upgraded to a 486DX25 . The 386 would
manage to grab a frame every 30 seconds, compress it into a JPG and
upload it to a webserver. The 486 manages every 10 seconds. Still for
a while the 386 was just about being useful.
But how many times per hour did you have to reboot it?
About once every 2 weeks, but by that time the upload speed had dropped
considerably. You could tell how long it would be before the next reboot
by the amount of HD activity. Just before failing the HD would be going
non-stop, I suspect a few memory leaks.... There was talk of buying
a timer plug to cut the power once a day for 15 minutes so it never
got too bad. Mind you you had to do all the configuration before you
started capturing images as the computer would start to fail to respond
to keyboard events once the webcam software had started.
Matthew Buckett