If all goes as planned (stop laughing!), this will be enough to help keep EvoCam running between restarts.  If not? Then the next step is increase the frequency of the reboots until I can set up the Mac Mini, and start all over on that machine.

Because, I am all out of options as far as out-of-the-box software after giving SecuritySpy a close look this weekend. The results, as always, were mixed.

Let me start off by saying SecuritySpy is a very sweet piece of software. It especially has great documentation and a responsive developer and forum community. Designed for monitoring property, it has many features that are appealing such as motion detection, a remote streaming service, and even an iOS app. However, when I tried to recreate all the actions I use for this website, I wasn’t able to accomplish everything.

I didn’t start off planning to give SecuritySpy (another) trial when I downloaded it on Saturday. I am doing some research for another camera-related project, and saw that the Ben Software product was listed as the only known Mac software that worked with the device I was investigating. The last thing I want is another project that I spend too much time fixing!

The pluses were that I was easily able to add my Hikvision camera, and that it was intuitive to have it upload a still image every 30 seconds. The minuses were that while it can save stills locally it doesn’t have a built-in method for stitching them together, and saving them as a video. Meaning that it can’t do time-lapse.  It does have the ability to change the playback rate of any continuous video it captures, which simulates time-lapse, but the resulting files are humongous by comparison to the current file sizes.

The other drawbacks SecuritySpy posed for me when it comes to recreating the FarmCam, is the scheduling feature. SecuritySpy doesn’t appear to have a way to schedule starting and stopping processes based on light sensors or location services to determine sunrise or sunset. Not to mention the inability to use any font I want as the overlay for the timestamp.

In other words, instead of dealing with a few crashes, I would have to write Automator applications with multiple steps and run cronjobs again.

I am very intrigued at the future use of SecuritySpy for my possible next project, but for now the search continues for macOS software that can do all the things EvoCam can.

Sigh.

I am not too busy at work, so I quickly go through all the usual steps to try and figure out why I can’t see the camera image in EvoCam. Including:

• Connect to the camera via it’s maker’s software. 
• Connect to the camera via the web interface. 
• Restarted EvoCam, the router, and the iMac. 

While logged into the AirPort Extreme via Airport Utility, I noticed that there weren’t many devices connected to it. This likely meant that it was a hardware or power issue. Since I could connect to the iMac via VPN that ruled out power.

Because of the snow storm, we were sent home to work remotely. But when I got home, I still did things the hard way. I looked at the switch and it looked to be working. Lights flashing on the appropriate ports. The PoE Injector was dangling a bit from the AC outlet, but the lights were on and it looked to be functioning.

So then I turned to cables. And naturaly I did this the wrong way as well. I started by unplugging the cable from the PoE to the switch. I changing the port. Then I decided to grab a new Ethernet cable. I was going to bypass the switch and go right to the router. I plugged the cable into the PoE and as I approached the router, I had a flash…

This morning, you moved the router to tuck the telephone line and power cable behind it. Did you…?

I reached behind the AirPort Extreme and pressed on the cable that leads to the switch.

Click.

Sigh.

That was it. I got in my own way (again) and created a problem for myself. This time because 2 small black cords were distracting to me. And then I kicked myself some more when I realized I didn’t even think of the most simple of checks by failing to turn on the AppleTV to see if it could connect.

Now the silver linings.

While I had been futzing with EvoCam from work in the morning, I noticed that the time-lapse movie was huge in file size. When I was home, I took a peek and noticed that I had 2 different processes writing to the same file name. This led to the movie being a combination of the last 3 days worth of video. I think I sorted that out, and I may not have noticed had I not screwed something else up!

Also, by doing all that hard work a few weeks ago organizing cables, and bypassing my wireless kluge, I freed up an old Airport Express. It sat on my desk for a few weeks, not unnoticed, as I discovered the grey of the Apple logo is the color I want to paint the upstairs bedroom/library/office/exercise room. The reason having the device was handy is that I was able to use it to plug the VoIP telephone from work in and be able to have it near the iMac which I use to screen share to the office so I can work from home. Much better than last time, when the phone was downstairs plugged into the AirPort Extreme and I had to put people on hold and run upstairs to look things up or troubleshoot.

So, I got that going for me.

I knew this would be easily accomplished with EvoCam by adding a new action set; so I set up a test, and let it run from 17 October through the last day of 2017. I used EvoCam to manually export the video to MP4 at 5 FPS. Below is the result. [edit: file is missing to history]

During this experiment I learned a few things:

• EvoCam software has location abilities, so I am able to have it do things at sunrise and sunset for my location. Therefore, in addition to the Daily Noon image, I have added a Daily Sunrise and Daily Sunset. These are still photos uploaded daily, and can be viewed with the other stills and videos on the FarmCam page. I will make time lapses from the images, but not sure if they will be seasonal or yearly.
• EvoCam may be able to allow me to cut out my buggy Automator cron job. Right now the encoding from the EvoCam MOV to an M4V is done via default settings in Automator. Then I use the Automator app to convert the M4V to MP4 and upload the file via FTP.  I am running tests now to see if EvoCam can export the final video as an MP4 rather than a MOV. It has a feature for uploading the resulting video to the web server, which is a good thing.
• If EvoCam can export as an MP4 then I can control the frames per second for playback as well. This allows me to slow down the final daily time lapse video, therefore making it more enjoyable viewing. Things that currently flash past, like animals, birds, cars, sheep, llamas, dogs, etc, will be visible.  The downside is that the video itself will be longer.  That may mean I will need to take stills once every 60 seconds instead of every 30 in order to reduce the final run time for the rustling time lapses.

I should have the answers to the experiment by tomorrow, and I can then make decisions.  Updates will follow.

Fingers crossed.