Dropcams: Public or Private

[Kamal]

I know we went back and forth on this a bit, but since a good friend of mine in Montreal, who belongs to at least one makerspace wrote this to me about the Dropcams, I thought it might be good fodder for discussion:

"Just fyi ..Closed circuit TV is fine, but if my makerspace insisted on Internetifying 'em, I'd leave. I wouldn't ever want to be eternally spied upon while trying new things. If ever I slipped and, say, cut my finger, I wouldn't want that to end up on the 'net 'coz up to infinite people may have been watching / recording. Just saying."

He is, by the way, willing to come down and lead a workshop:

"Also, yes, I'll teach something. What/when?"

The reasons for the Dropcams was mainly so people would know if anyone was at Lowell Makes so they can come down and hang out. Obviously there's the privacy/spying/creeped-out factor to consider.

What if we keep one public that's far enough away, maybe we leave it at that, and then make all other Dropcams private?

[leftyfb]

What about just taking stills and posting every few minutes or so? The idea of people being "watched" really isn't a thing at that point. Also, if we wanted to nix the camera view entirely but stick with alerting people to being in the space, we could send the motion alert emails to a script and post some sort of badge on the website with a timestamp with the last movement.

[Kamal]

I like the idea of using the motion alerts to trigger a script or something like that. We might also want some link to the RFID/NFC access system that triggers a "someone's here" script.

Though I think we can also find other ways to setup a badge on the web site and also perhaps to have 1-2 general area cameras that people won't feel watched by.

We do want video for security and safety purposes, but we might be able to use something less public for that, and have another way to let people know there's stuff going on.

Maybe it's open for more discussion depending on how people feel.

[leftyfb]

What if we do something like this:

https://twitter.com/i3Detroit
http://i3detroit.org/wi/index.php?title=I3TwitterBot

It wouldn't even require the use of the dropcams

[pataelmo]

Along the lines of just showing pic from the last minute as leftyb suggested, I happened to pull up the dropcam feed this afternoon and saw progress on the wall being made. I then immediately thought of trying to capture images for a time-lapse video. I was able to find the url needed to grab the images from the dropcams and wrote a script to capture all once a minute. I even found a trick to automatically delete any image that is very similar to a reference of all the lights are off so I don't fill my server with images of the dark space.

Unfortunately I was just finishing this as the worker were finishing for the day, but I still think it could be fun to make a time-lapse of the progress so hopefully this will capture that going forward.

[leftyfb]

Can you post this on online like github? This is exactly something Kamal has been looking for. We have a github group at https://github.com/LowellMakes.

[pataelmo]

I would love to post this on github for Lowell Makes. I'm still learning git and github, but I've created an account , created a test repo, cloned it, and commited an pushed back to github. What do I need to do to create/use one of the repos belonging to LowellMakes?

My username on github is the same as here: pataelmo

[leftyfb]

I have added you to the LowellMakes organization.

[pataelmo]

I've posted what I got (with our UUIDs from our dropcams stripped) to github.

https://github.com/LowellMakes/dropcam_timelapse

Enjoy

[leftyfb]

It doesn't seem to be working for me. Just a plain wget comes up with a 404

yes I put in the UUID of one of the dropcams