The Project & History
Scootercam started as a 2012 Christmas gift - an Acurite weather station I installed here on the Lake Michigan shoreline. The station observed 5 data points: temperature, humidity, pressure, wind direction, and wind speed. When connected to the Internet, the station could send data to the Weather Underground website - which also supported webcam uploads. Our webcam was crude and heavy, but it worked.
Then Weather Underground announced they would discontinue hosting users' webcams. They reversed that decision a month later, but by then we decided to control our own destiny and host our own website. We dedicated a personal computer to run 24/7, collect weather data, and send it periodically to the website. It would also manage a camera to take images, create timelapse videos, and send them to the website. Code I'd written on the web server processed and displayed the data and pictures, so scootercam.net was off and running.
How it's evolved
Rick's Sandbox I've been scripting with PHP for 30 years. I'm not great at it, but have been able to continue to learn and use the skills to improve the site. From time to time I've focussed on best practices: faster-loading pages, better image processing and delivery, visualizing data. That means the site is always a work in progress. Its 'look and feel' has changed a lot over the years.
Connectivity. By far the biggest limiting factor is Internet upload speeds. Early on that meant slow DSL, so our architecture was designed to not rely on frequent, large uploads. Now we have a fiber optic connection and the bottleneck is eliminated. We can do more work locally, produce more and larger files, even add another camera - and still not break a sweat.
Equipment at home. An office-class Windows PC was a powerful base for the system, but too much for the job at hand. A few lines of code can make a webcam take a picture every 10 seconds, and a very simple computer can do that. The next step was to eliminate the Windows back-end and replace it with a system built to do just this job, without the Widows overhead. I added a Raspberry Pi 5 with solid-state drive to the network, and learned enough to migrate all camera operations to a processor the size of a deck of cards.
Where it stands today. Scootercam is a mature, actively maintained system with redundancy and succession planning built into how it's run — not just a hobby project, but one intended to keep running reliably over the long term. We're now trying to document what we can about how it works. Something somewhere will break, and hopefuly the fix is in the notes somewhere.
Why a Michigan LLC
ScooterCam Worldwide LLC exists to give the project a clean legal and financial structure — separating its costs and any revenue from personal finances, and making an eventual handoff to a successor straightforward rather than tangled.