With everyone having broadband now it is extremely easy to access your PC from anywhere in the world. And best of all completely free.

Software for controlling your PC has been around for a number of years and recently Microsoft have had a remote desktop feature built into their operating systems.

Personally the software I use for all my systems is an application called UltraVNC . For a free application this has loads of different features.

Key features: File transfer , Video driver , optional Encryption Plugins , MS Logon , Text chat , Viewer Toolbar , Java Viewer with File Transfer , as well as Auto scaling and Server Side Scaling, Multiple-Monitors-support,Repeater/Proxy-support, Auto reconnection, good performances and tons of other functionalities.

Addons: Repeater , SingleClick generator and NATtoNAT connectors , that help you to easily handle the most complex connection situations.

UltraVNC runs under Windows ™ operating systems (95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003…). Its embedded Java Viewer allows you to connect (and make File transfers) from a simple Web Browser on any Operating system supporting Java ™ (Linux, Mac OS…) to an UltraVNC server.

It is extremely simple to install and use.
1. Install the Server application on the PC you wish to control.
2. Add a secure password to the UltraVNC server
3. If you have broadband log into your router and add a firewall entry to allow port 5900 through to your PC.
4. Install the client software on your PC

Thats it, just get the client to connect to your home IP address and thats it.
You will be asked fore your password and then your home pc’s screen will appear.

Setting up a Wireless webcam is not as difficult as you might think.

Basically all you need to think about is

1. What do you need to record the image
2. How do you get that image into the PC
3. What do you need to do to show that image on the web

Firstly I went on to a well know auction site ( EBAY lol ) and bought a PCI capture card.

You will find a lot of these cards come with Windows software, but a component of Linux is V4L ( video for linux ) and luckily these cards use a connexant BTTV chip with is well supported under linux.

To enable this card all you have to do is add the following lines to your modprobe.conf file

alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 bttv
options bttv card=77 tuner=-1 radio=0 triton1=0 vsfx=0 autoload=0

This will give you 4 different inputs you can use , so you could have 4 cameras connected up and displayed on your web page.

Next I bought the wireless camera kit.

You can find really cheap kits, but to be legal in the UK you need to buy a 2.4ghz one . By fitting the camera into a small case I could easily have it anywhere in my garden. ( The only downfall with the wireless camera is that with a normal cheap PP3 battery you only get around 2 hours of life )

A rough formula on how long your camera will stay alive for is

Note: Use of this formula does not guarantee that you will get the determined battery life. Other factors such as weather condition (temperature, humidity, etc.), and battery condition can extend/shorten the battery life.

So I have looked at putting a PP9 battery on instead, also I want to be able to stop the camera from working at night. So to combat this I have been looking into fitting a small light sensor between the battery and the camera.

The circuit for this can be found Dark/Light Activated Relay Circuit

In order to capture the camera pictures I used an application called fswebcam.

Then I had a shell script run every 5 minutes to capture the picture

/usr/local/bin/fswebcam -q \
 -d /dev/video0 -i 0   \
 --banner-colour "#44000000" --line-colour "#FF000000" \
 --title "GadgetDude" --subtitle "Garden Cam" \
 /w3/cam1.jpg

This basically captures the image from camera input 0, labels it and puts it in my web area.