Our Patio Cam is a D-Link DCS-1000, an Ethernet-based web cam. We chose the DCS-1000 due to the distance requirement between the externally mounted camera and the base computer. The wired "1000" version was chosen over the wireless "1000w" version for issues of stability.

The exterior mounting also required the construction of a custom waterproof housing, which had the potential of interfering with the wireless 2.4ghz 802.11b connection in unpredictable ways.

Dylon Whyte, webmaster for anchorgrill.com, constructed the waterproof housing employing several pieces of black ABS plumbing conduit. The housing is multi-chambered, to keep heat from the power transformer separate from the main camera hardware. For maintenance, the entire housing can be disassembled in less than 10 minutes, the main joints being sealed with a removable silicone waterproofing compound.

The camera is mounted beneath The Anchor Inn's main sign, overlooking our patio and significant section of downtown Little Current.

The DCS-1000 is employed as a two-function web cam on our site. The first function is to provide still shots of our patio for low-bandwidth users. This is accomplished by the DCS-1000's built-in FTP upload capability, which uploads a new snapshot to our webserver every 20 seconds.

The second function is accomplished through the DCS-1000's built-in webserver, which broadcasts the high bandwidth-streaming version of our patio cam. It is capable of serving the streaming video to 64 concurrent viewers at resolutions as high as 640 x 480 pixels, however, it is currently configured to 320 x 240 pixels.

Our base computer is a refurbished Pentium III, which is connected to the Internet via a high speed wireless connection provided by MSD Communications, who also installed the network wiring for the Patio Cam, as well as handling the necessary router configurations and web hosting.

Special thanks goes to D-link's technical support department, who were more than helpful in addressing our needs, even before we decided to employ one of their products.

Please click on the picture below for a close-up picture of our Patio Cam!