I thought I'd share this as it has worked better than I expected.
My weather cam is just a USB connected webcam in an external CCTV Security Camera Housing Enclosure on the roof, like this one
and as I live in a fairly cold part of the hills here in South Oz most mornings it is misted over... so I bought one of these
https://www.testar.com.au/products/zwo- ... dew-heater
and attached it to the inside of the screen and ran the wiring down to a 1amp 12v DC transformer, via a relay that is controlled by the raspberry pi where I run Cumulus.
I tested it manually this morning and this was the image at 7:35am - if you look today 26/7/20 (or in the next 28 days before it is ages out) you can see the transition on the replay.
and this was the image at 7:55
I have written a shell script which will just turn it on 30 minutes before I start catching images for 30 minutes, but am in the process of adding the functionality to that script so it will only turn it on if the over night apparent low (which should be the temperature of the camera enclosure) is less than the current dew point.
Next I'll see how it copes with rain on the screen and turn it on when it heavy rain is recorded.
If I still ran Cumulus on Windoze I would have just used a timer to turn it on during the colder months as I know very little about that OS, but as a Linux Engineer I can add the extra functionality from the Pi.
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Latest Cumulus MX V4 release 4.0.0 (build 4022) - 11 May 2024
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Latest Cumulus MX V4 release 4.0.0 (build 4022) - 11 May 2024
Latest Cumulus MX V3 release 3.28.6 (build 3283) - 21 March 2024
Legacy Cumulus 1 release 1.9.4 (build 1099) - 28 November 2014
(a patch is available for 1.9.4 build 1099 that extends the date range of drop-down menus to 2030)
Download the Software (Cumulus MX / Cumulus 1 and other related items) from the Wiki
stop webcam from misting up
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- Weather Station: Fine Offset WH1091
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stop webcam from misting up
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- Weather Station: davis vantage
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Re: stop webcam from misting up
I had the same issue with my CCTV camera which I was using to monitor weather for our local weather page. I purchased some CCTV housing from this site https://www.dtsdigitalcctv.co.uk/Camera-Housing.asp which has a built in heater which prevents condensation and misting of the cameras lens.
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- Posts: 690
- Joined: Sat 26 Dec 2009 8:52 am
- Weather Station: Fine Offset WH1091
- Operating System: Raspbian Buster
- Location: Crafers, South Australia
- Contact:
Re: stop webcam from misting up
Nice!! thanks for the link