Bill’s Blog

About six months ago I got this crazy idea.  What if I put a webcam up on our hill?  There was no power up there, so I thought of the options.  I settled on the idea of building a solar powered webcam.  Having never done this before, I set out to learn about solar panels, batteries, and webcams.  I’ve tried to capture the important parts here so you can learn from what I’ve done and build your own solar powered webcam.

First, select the camera.  There are hundreds of webcams to choose from.  I was looking for an inexpensive camera that could be mounted outdoors and that was wireless.  I was not running any wires up to the hill.  I decided to skip the PTZ cameras (the ones with pan, tilt, and zoom) since I knew I’d be running on battery power.  I choose an indoor camera with a matching outdoor housing rather than the outdoor cameras.  The main factor was cost.  My Trendnet IP-TV110W was $74.46 on Amazon.  Outdoor cameras are much more expensive.  Trendnet also makes an outdoor housing with a mount designed for the camera.  The other thing to worry about with a solar powered setup is how much power the camera draws.  This one says it draws 6 watts max.

The next thing to consider was how much solar power I would need to power the camera.  I assumed six watts max meant 2.5-3 watts nominal, or 60-72 watts each day.  At 12 volts, that’s six amp hours each day.  Since solar panel installations run off of batteries, they end up being just as important as the panel.  You need a battery that will hold enough power to run the camera all day.  The panel needs to provide enough power to charge the batteries each day with the limited amount of sunlight available.  According to Solar Oregon, Portland gets about 4 hours of peak sun on average each day.  To test my assumptions about the power bring drawn from the camera, I bought a Kill a Watt meter and plugged the camera into it for a week.  The power consumption was so small that it never registered on the meter.  Armed with this info I decided on the 15 Watt Sunforce 50032 Solar Panel.  The panel shoudl generate about 60 watts of power each day to the battery.  I ended up buying a 33 Amp Hour battery from Batteries Plus locally.  While I could have used a smaller battery, I wanted the extra power available for those winter days when there isn’t much sun.

To connect the panel to the battery, you use a device called a charge controller.  One side connects to the panel.  The other side connects to the battery.  Basically, it keeps the panel from overcharging the battery.  I chose the Sunforce 7 Amp model.

Once I had chosen the camera, panel, and battery, the next step was putting it all together.  I started by mounting the panel on a pole at the top of the hill in my backyard.  I fretted quite a bit over how to mount it to the pole.  In the end I used three 12 inch 2×4s, a metal L bracket, and a 4×4 post.  The top and bottom 2×4s are bolted onto the panel through the mounting holes provided.  The middle 2×4 is attached to the metal L bracket and resting on the panel mounts.

Solar panels work best when mounted facing South at roughly 45 degrees.  To accomplish this, I bolted the L-bracket to the side of a 4×4.  The 4×4 was concreted into the ground for stability.

Once the panel was in place, I connected the charge controlled and batter.  To keep the charge controller dry, I mounted a small (6×6x4) plastic sealed box to the 4×4.  Wires go in and out of the box through a small hole drilled in the bottom.  I chose the size of the box so it was large enough to fit the chrage controller, an inverter, and the power adapter for the camera.  I could have also just built or bought something to convert the batteries 12 volts to the fix volts used by the camera.  In this case, the Charge Controller is connected to the battery.  This is how the battery is charged.  The inverter is also connected to the battery.  The inverter has a cigarette lighter style input on it, so I bought a cigarette lighter style jack at a local auto parts store.  I used heavy duty velcro to hold the charge controller and cigarette lighter adapter to the back of the case.

At this point, there is power to the inverter.  I first plugged in an LED nightlight to test it.  Instead of a webcam, I could power lights. a radio, or other small electronic devices.  A solar setup like this can be used in many situations.

Once I had power it was time to mount the camera.  When I say the camera, I actually mean the camera, the camera housing, the arrestor, and the external antenna.  That’s a lot of stuff!  The first thing I bought was the camera.  I tested it out to get it working as I wanted, then ordered the housing.  Once it got here, I realized I needed an external wifi antenna.  I choose the smallest outdoor antenna from this manufacturer.  It is still almost 2 feet tall!  The reason for an antenna is twofold.  First, the camera is in a metal box.  Its wifi reception is going to be hampered by this fact.  Second, the camera is a ways away from the wifi router, which is inside and at the other end of the house.  I tested the signal first by walking around on the hill with my ipod touch.  It worked fine and so does the camera.  The arrestor has two functions.  The first is to convert the cable from an SMA to N-type connector.  This connects the antenna to the camera.  The second and most important function is to protect the camera from a lightening strike.  Finally, I had to plug the camera into the inverter in the box mounted to the 4×4.  I had to cut the power adapter at both ends.  The DC plug doesn’t physically fit through the holes in the camera enclosure, so the manufacturer recommends cutting the wire.  I had to do the same at the other end.  This was both to lengthen the wire and to fit the wire through the hole in the bottom of the plastic box mounted to the pole.

The next result is a solar powered webcam that broadcasts live video 24×7.  The total cost for the project was $564.60.  This is less than many of the outdoor cameras I looked at.  It is also less than what it would cost to hire an electrician to run 110V to my hill.  I thoroughly enjoyed building this and am now thinking of all kinds of things I could power with my solar panel.

Annette and Jim insisted that we try Krumpe’s Do-nuts.  The shop itself is in a small house in a dark alley.  They’re only open 7 PM - 2 AM.  And they are delicious.  We had them one night and had to go back the next night for more!

That was certainly entertaining, but not the strangest thing we saw on our trip.  The town of Williamsport takes the cake. It was a lovely little town that we visited to see the civil war era bridge they have there.  While driving through the town, we noticed that many of the houses had downspouts that drained into the street (like the one below).

And speaking of bridges

We saw many civil war era bridges on our trip.  They’re interesting to look at.  It’s also interesting to see them still standing and still being used.

9200 Square feet!  That’s the size of our first President’s house.  Very cool.  It was fascinating to see what he’d done with the place.  The site is beautiful.  The house is beautiful.  The river is beautiful.  I enjoyed our little trip into history very much.  See all the pics here.

This was taken in the parking lot of the Antietam National Park.  The lights are solar powered.  This is similar to the setup I’m planning for my solar powered webcam.

The 12-hour battle began at dawn, Sapetmber 17.  The battle ended about 6 pm.  Of nearly 100,000 soldiers engaged in battle, about 23,000 were killed, wounded, or missing.  It was the bloodiest one-day battle of the American Civil War.

Visiting Antietam was different than I expected.  The fields was empty, quiet.  While the battle came alive at Gettysburg, Antietam felt subdued.  Someone else described their visit to Antietam as emotional.  It was amazing to see the place where so many people fought and died.

The pictures don’t do the place justice, but they are here anyway.

This trip was our first visit to Gettysburg.  It was less than two hours away from where we were staying so we loaded everyone up and headed out.  One of the best recommendations we got was to hire a tour guide.  He literally drove the car around for us as he talked.  In the two hours he was with us, he gave us a brief history (more of a play by play) of the battle at Gettysburg.  What made it so interesting was that he drove us around in a way where he could stop and say here - this is where such and such happened.

After the tour we also took a little trek to Cemetery Hill where Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address.  It was sobering.  There was a monument, and also many headstones from the Civil War and other later wars.

After learning all of the history I was excited to find a bookstore in the museum.  They must have every book ever written about the Civil War.  The whole experience gave me a renewed respect for the people that fought for what they believed in.

See all of the pics here.

Of all the places we went on vacation, I was most excited to see the National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.  It did not disappoint.  The image above was what we were greeted with as soon as we walked in the front door.

Besides that we got to look at an F-14, a Joint Strike Fighter, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, several MIGs, an A-6E, a concord, and a hanger full of other very cool planes.  If you’re in the DC area, you won’t want to miss this.  See all of the pics I published here.  There are more, of course.  If you’re really interested just ask.

I had a great opportunity that fell in my lap a few weeks ago.  I was invited to speak at Stanford about the value of foreign education and experience.  The event was yesterday.  For my part, I was on a panel with three other folks.  Two of us spoke about our experiences hiring and working with engineers from outside the US.  The other two folks represented big Indian outsourcing companies and spoke mostly about their hiring process built for volume (~25k people a year).

It was cool to be invited and I was thrilled to go.  The attendees were a mix of academics and industry folks.  May were professors studying similar topics.  A few folks from the GAO were there.  Several attendees came from far flung places like India and New Jersey.  There were ~30 people all in all.

The meeting was in an ornately decorated room on campus.  I don’t think I’ve seen so much wood paneling ever.  There was a massive fireplace at one end.  But they had a great sound system, a dedicated AV guy, and comfortable chairs.  The whole time I kept wondering if anyone there twittered?  I still don’t know

For lunch they had arranged for lunch at Google.  It was my first time there, so I jumped at the opportunity.

The day was a nice change of pace for me and I enjoyed every part of it except for getting up at 4:30 to catch the flight down there.

This past week I attended the Society of Information Management’s monthly get together at the invitation of my friend Aaron.  The featured speakers were a couple of guys from Google, Brian Kemler and Steve Benson.  Their topic was innovation.  I found the discussion interesting and took a few notes.  Read on if you’re interested.

- True innovation means both technical innovaton and business model innovation.  They said Page Rank was an example of technology innovation while Text Ads on search pages was business model innovation.

- 50% of the employees at Google are engineers.  From what they said I could also add “and doing engineering work”.  I don’t know what the percentage is elsewhere, but I thought this was a great formula for success.

- When they talked about resources, they talked about people and machines.  I found it interesting that they didn’t talk about money.

- Google uses a 70-20-10 model for where they focus.  70% of their resources focus on core businesses like search, ads, and apps.  20% focus on adjencies or related businesses, and 10% of their resources are focused on exploratory type work.

- Flat management structure.  8 layers from bottom to top. (this is flat?)

- Hire for culture fit (one person I spoke with later in the week said he had 24 interviews when he was hired.  I also learned that Larry Page still reviews every single hire before an offer is made.)

- Dedicate time for inovation.  All engineers can spend 20% of their time on anything they want.  Though this guy did say that that 20% time usually means 120% time meaning that a lot of the innovation work is done after hours.  I asked him how they manage the 20% time.  I was met with a blank stare.  He eventually said that they hire smart, passionate people who want to work on interesting things, so the 20% wasn’t a problem.

- Experiment and realize that some things won’t work.  He gave an example of the electrical substation in The Dalles data center.  The power company was going to take a couple years to build it so Google decided to do it themselves.

- Encourage people to act on new ideas

- Big Award culture.  Their founders awards are in the millions (wow!).  They have Executive awards in the several hundred thousand dollar range.  Smaller awards are ~$1500.  They also have spot awards that anyone can give.  These are $175 or so.  One thing he said about the big awards was that they provided good incentive for people to not leave and work for Facebook or Twitter.

- locate engineering centers near the International Colleagic Award Contest Winners (or something like that - think very smart people)

- managers have up to 50 people reporting to them.  They don’t have staff meetings, but instead do weekly snippets.  They are stored in an internal, public db (as is everything at Google).

- TGIF meetings Friday at 4.  The execs answer employee questions.  When the company got too big for this to be done in person, they started a system where employee questions are submitted electronically and voted on.  They most popular wind up at the top of the list.  He said that isn’t always comfortable, as some of the questions can be difficult to answer.

- iterative design, constant improvement.  They release early and release often.  They must have metioned cloud computing and its advantages 100 times during the presentation.  This was one of them.  Cloud computing allows them to add or remove features anytime they want.

- crazy “org” chart.  not top down, expect people to do the right thing.  don’t dictate technology.  can use macs or pcs, ppt or google docs.

- Internally they use search for everything.  They don’t bother to organize information.

- External sites all run gubuntu, GFS, and Big Table (their DB).  This horizonal platform, purpose built hw, and their massive scale is used by all google apps.  Also, there are UI guidelines but no hard and fast rules.

- They talked about customers not being locked in.  They felt they had to earn people’s trust and their business.  They view competition as a good thing.

- Internal tool called Ideas.  New ideas are entered into the system.  Peopl vote on their favorites.  Engineers work on the top ideas.  Many thigns at google seem to work this way.

- budget time not money

- “cool” projects get the engineers

- when they kill projects they kep them alive for the existing users

- they turn features off if users don’t use them

Since you’ve read this far, I’ll give you a bonus.  Later in the week I had lunch at the Google campus in Mountain View.  I was in a small group meeting with Ivan Ernest, the Head of Global HR, Engineering and Operations. There were a few additional things he shared.

- you can put yourself in for a promotion anytime you want, even if your boss doesn’t agree with it.  They build a “package” of peer reviews of your work and have peers who don’t know you make the decision.

- new hires are often brought in as “MTS” - Members of Technical Staff.  After a year or so their peers provide reviews about them.  Then peers who don’t know them decide what level they should be.  It’s a strange culture for sure, though it seems to be working for them.

- Seems like many many things are voted on, or managed by peer reviews.  An example are their quarterly objectives and key results.  They are done bottoms up with very little tops down input.  Ivan said that Google’s approach was to hire the smartest people they could and then ask them what they should be doing.

A final note.  I had lunch in the Google cafeteria.  It is free for everyone, including me.  The food was great, there was plenty of variety, but there was a certain sense of disorganization to it all.  It was a wonderful trip.

One of my favorite podcasts is This Week in Tech.  Leo Leporte has a style that resonates with me.  He assembles some of the best pontificators around to talk about technology.  One of the regulars on the show is John C. Dvorak. John always has strong opinions about things.

On the show he’s shared that he and his wife have a deli in Port Angeles.  PA is right down the road from Sequim.  I asked Karen if she thought we could find it.  She googled it on her phone and soon we had the address.  I wanted to stop by and say hello and let whoever was there know that I was a fan of John’s work.  We showed up around 3:30 on Saturday.  Turns out they close at 3:00.  I took a picture just to say I was there.

If you happen to read this John, I am not a stalker.  I just wanted to come by and say hello.