Rebuilding the Free Food Cam
A Brief History
Here's a brief history of the SCS Coke Machine, which goes up to about 1990. At some point, an intrepid soul connected a webcam to the coke machine, pointed at the table
near the coke machine on which free food, the grad student's primary form of sustenance, is traditionally placed.
At some point last year (2007), this coke machine computer broke, possibly from heat issues, and went offline.
At some point last year (2007), this coke machine computer broke, possibly from heat issues, and went offline.
The Reconstruction
We started by replacing the computer with an adorable Pico-ITX PC running linux, combined that with a Dell 17" LCD monitor (which fits really nicely above the drink selection buttons) and a Logitech webcam.
Here's Alex, doing the install:
Look at that duct tape! Nothing says "safe and secure" like duct tape!
In the final shot, you can see our webcam, mounted on a lighting fixture, at the top-middle of the picture. The screen itself is an iGoogle page (running some greasemonkey hacks), with modules displaying the date, time, weather, and some other stuff.
If you're on the SCS network, you can see the webcam's current picture. You might also be interested in the Coke machine's Twitter feed, which is also displayed on the monitor and is sometimes really creepy. Many thanks to Luis von Ahn for providing the funding to make the free food cam a reality.
Here's Alex, doing the install:
Look at that duct tape! Nothing says "safe and secure" like duct tape!
In the final shot, you can see our webcam, mounted on a lighting fixture, at the top-middle of the picture. The screen itself is an iGoogle page (running some greasemonkey hacks), with modules displaying the date, time, weather, and some other stuff.
If you're on the SCS network, you can see the webcam's current picture. You might also be interested in the Coke machine's Twitter feed, which is also displayed on the monitor and is sometimes really creepy. Many thanks to Luis von Ahn for providing the funding to make the free food cam a reality.