Despite lots of tests I was unable to get a consistent time-lapse after the switch. The streaming on YouTube worked fine, but EvoCam just didn’t seem to like the new camera. Time-lapses were choppy at best often displaying the same image for much, if not the entire, video. The timestamp overlay would change, but not the image.

Over the course of about a month I tried changing various settings in the Amcrest configuration. First trying a smaller image size — no way 4k was going to work — and then changing the bit rates. Nothing worked. Then I tried moving OBS software running the live stream from the ancient Mac Mini to my iMac, leaving only EvoCam on the Mini. No change.

I am admitting defeat on this, and have returned to the Hikvision camera. I am glad I heeded the advice of my wife and left the Hikvision in place, so the swap was a simple reconnection of the Ethernet cable and changing a few things on EvoCam and OBS.

The hope is that I can still use the Amcrest camera in a future project (Sheep Barn Cam anyone?), but for now we are back to where we were a few months ago, but at least everything is working. *knock wood*

In 1996, I became enamored with sharing my point of view with others, and installed a VHS-C camcorder in the western-pointing window of the 8th floor apartment I shared in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

However, it wasn’t until my wife and I moved to our little farmstead in Tunbridge, Vermont that things really took shape.

While this domain is new as of July 2020, this FarmCam has been running on my personal site and our small business site since 2006. I have moved it to its own domain in order to better organize the project and the various tools that help automate much of the process.

I’m impressed at least.

As you may recall the outdoor webcam was hardwired  to an (old) Airport Express via a POE injector.  The (old) Airport Express was then plugged into an outlet in the basement, and connected to the main wireless network. It was a hack. A temporary solution to something it took me 2 years to clean up.

Now the cable that comes from the outdoor webcam goes up through the floor of the basement right where it comes in the house. Then it comes out right behind the entertainment center in the living room where it connects to the POE injector and the network switch connected directly to the Airport Extreme. A much cleaner solution.

In order to get that done I cut a few dozen feet of old wire from when we had Dish Network, and even an old telephone cord. That knot of cabling was unsightly, and even more so with the entertainment cabinet now up on legs. Once they were gone I was able to fish a wire coat hanger up through the hole in the floor and up into the box in the wall. It took a few tries, but with a little help from my wife we were able to get it done.

Then this morning I did something I have been threatening to do for many months, but was always a little afraid to start. I completely reformatted the hard drive on the iMac, and reinstalled macOS. The threatening I mention was more planning then shaking a fist at the machine each time it failed at something.  I made backups. I wrote long detailed instructions on how the camera worked, and I took screenshots.  I copied important files to off-site cloud backups, and I made sure I had a few good Time Machine backups.  I used Notes to create a list of Must Have software, and I ticked off the list slowly over the day.

Right after installing Dropbox and 1Password, I got the webcam and all of its processes up and running.  Not too much down time, but today’s timelapse won’t be much, and I forgot to enable the daylight timelapse until it was dark, so that likely will be missing completely.  But everything should be back to normal by Tuesday, and so far everything is humming along.

Fingers crossed.