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After viewing several other farm webcams on
the web we thought that having our own farm cam would be nice and
a valuable resource for us as well as our customers enabling
people to see the weather conditions here on the farm as well as
any work activity going on in view of the cam.
But, like other electronic purchase making
decisions that you are not familiar with we found out fairly quick
there was a ton of cameras of all shapes, sizes, cost etc. and
deciding on specific one was taking up to much valuable time.
With limited funds for such an endeavor we weren't looking for
anything special or high tech, just a simple camera that would
show a fair looking picture.
Our good friend Mike Dunton of the
Victory Seed
Company surprised us by donating an X Eye
web camera. Their generosity lead us to getting our farm cam up
and running super fast.
The PC Chips Xeye web cam is your typical
small size web camera intended for indoor use. It is a very easy
camera to install and set up and the picture quality is pretty
good. The only disadvantage to using a web cam intended for indoor
use is of course it has to stay indoors but this is not a major
problem because it can be mounted in a window. Glare from the sun
is also a drawback to just about any non-outdoor web camera and
because our only easy location to set up the camera is in a window
facing south/southwest light glare is an even bigger problem. This
problem was solved to some extent by adding a polarizing lens
(actually a pair of old polarized sunglasses) which knocks down
the glare but also makes the image look darker and makes the
image look more grainy than it normally would under the right
light conditions.
The picture at the top of the page is a
close up of the cam in the window from inside my office.
Picture below shows the cam set up from outside the office.
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