Web Cam Suggestion?

Tempest Owners
41

Hi Amanda and welcome,
The Tempest has no way of integrating a camera.
Our requests to incorporate a camera view into the Tempest display of our weather has not produced anything.
Those of us who are displaying a picture of our clouds and weather are using different software to the default Tempest display.
My guess is that you may want to know if you can display your pictures onto a publicly accessible web page along with your weather information from the Tempest?
My advice is to read the manual for your cameras to see if they provide anything to do that.
An option may be to upload images to windy.com by giving them the link to your camera, but I am only guessing what you may be wanting to achieve.
Another option is to use a raspberrypi to run weewx but that involves technical skill.
What is your desire or purpose of what you want to do?
Cheers Ian :slight_smile:

42

If you have any home security cameras, you can manually cross-referene video and weather based on timestamps.

This worked GREAT for me when filing an insurance claim for wind damage.
I fast tracked the insurance company’s research by providing the document below.

I found the wind event from Tempest data, then went to that timestamp on my RING video archive.

You can automate all this, that would need to be a custom thing.

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image1315×1771 175 KB

43

There are lots of ways to get weather cams and timelapse etc. given a little work.

If you have a pi and any old usb camera running “fswebcam” periodically via cron can take great photos. Then stitch them together with ffmpeg on a pi into a movie. Or run ‘motion’ on the pi in timelapse mode. So many ways to get there.

But that doesn’t integrate the images or movies into the Tempest weather app etc. which is what lots of folks have asked for over the years.

Generating the snapshots…

#!/bin/bash
NOW=`date +%s`
fswebcam /home/pi/timelapse/out/${NOW}.jpg

Processing them into a movie…

# process jpg into a mp4 the mac can read natively
#    ref: https://medium.com/@sekhar.rahul/creating-a-time-lapse-video-on-the-command-line-with-ffmpeg-1a7566caf877

# note this uses 432x240 which is the default resolution above for this camera
# you can generate bigger ones by adding -r 1280x720 for example above
# and tuning the -s option below to whatever is actually generated
# (the 'file' command seems to report tht out)

ffmpeg -y \
   -framerate 30 \
   -pattern_type glob -i "/home/pi/timelapse/out/*.jpg" \
   -s:v 432x240 \
   -c:v libx264 \
   -crf 17 \
   -pix_fmt yuv420p \
        /home/pi/timelapse/out/my-timelapse.mp4

Just as a data point, processing 12 hours of snapshots on a pi5 into a movie takes about 15 secs this way. There are of course a zillion commercial products for mac/windows that do the same kinds of things and many cameras let you query their interfaces for data.

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