Early this year, I volunteered to manage the website for the Peninsula Channel Commanders R/C group.

The group’s site, launched in 2001, was functional but needed a new coat of pixels.

I redesigned the site. Actually, I redesigned the site a number of times, refining the look and feel with each iteration as I learned more about what I was doing.

Months Later… That went quite well, though it took me lots of hours. In February when I told her what I’d signed up for, Suzette said, “See you in May.” She’s an excellent prophet.

The only spanner in the works was the website’s most popular feature: the Field Camera.

This is a lash-up of an integrated webcam and server which talks to a modem which calls a dial-up ISP and then uploads a photo to the PCC website. Repeat every 10 minutes during daylight hours, every day of the year.

All this gear lives in a sealed 5-gallon paint bucket mounted high in a ramshackle barn slightly north of the airfield, powered by the world’s longest electrical extension cord running from a nearby farmhouse and transmitting over the world’s longest phone extension cord.

Good News. Bad News. The good news was that it all works, reliably sending a 640×480 picture of the field through wind, rain, fog and sunshine.

The bad news was that it scared me. While I’m happy writing HTML, Javascript and CSS and diving into web languages, protocols and acronyms, networking stuff seems like the darkest magic.

Luckily, my friend Bruce Crawford offered to make friends with the webcam.

I gave him all the manuals and the software and returned to twiddling with HTML.

“I was just noodling around trying to figure out the camera to PCC communication and totally not getting it,” Bruce wrote on Feb 28.

The Camera Is Nuts. The previous webmaster had provided us with excellent notes, but Bruce found the camera was a nut-case when he tried to talk to it to change some settings. Sometimes it ignored his calls. Sometimes it answered, responded nicely to Bruce’s requests and then stopped sending pictures after the call.

The next day it would begin sending pictures again, for no obvious reason.

Bruce began to twitch.

Snakebit, we agreed that we wouldn’t try to change any more settings.

A week or two later, Bruce and PCC member Harry Smith went to the barn to clean the lens on the camera and make sure it was comfy in its bucket.

The Wall Says Hi. Unfortunately, the bucket is jam-full of equipment. When they sealed the bucket the camera shifted position and part of the barn wall slid into all subsequent field pictures.

Apart from that, the camera has worked perfectly ever since.

Until last Friday.

The camera sent its last picture at 5:30 a.m. that day.

I sent an email to Harry, who knows the lay of the land. Harry contacted Bruce. We met at the field Saturday morning.

Loose Connections? My first bet was that a cable had come loose. This looked like a sure thing when I saw the length of the cables running to and fro the barn.

Harry, a tall, fit man with a Southern accent and a dry sense of humor, pulled out a voltmeter. We had power on the ground floor of the barn.

“Watch your step in the barn,” Harry advised. “Stay on the long boards and framing.”

We all climbed a steep stairway in the barn and went to the bucket.

When Bruce popped it open, I saw the lights on the modem and knew that we had power here, too.

Bruce checked the connections. Everything looked OK.

“It’s a real Rube Goldberg contraption,” I said.

Harry agreed. “At work we used to say that we’d done so much with so little for so long that now we could make anything out of nothing.”

Silent Modem. We didn’t hear the modem make a call, even though we’d been fiddling around for more than 10 minutes.

Bruce produced a telephone handset and connected it to the phone line. No dialtone!

We verified the problem with a portable laptop computer modem: No dialtone.

Downstairs, we walked to the junction box installed by the phone company. Bruce jacked in his handset. Same result.

But which the phone company do we call?

We guessed AT&T, and after a couple of phone calls we found someone at AT&T who verified that it was their line.

Tiffany to the Rescue. Bruce was transferred to a woman named Tiffany.

“As a reward for making this call,” Harry said, “we’re going to give you Tiffany.” Bruce ignored him.

Tiffany checked the line and reported that it was not working.

She scheduled a repair visit for Monday.

Dull Normal. Feeling smart and powerful, we climbed the stairs again to visit the bucket, where we were quickly downsized to dull normal.

Bruce fired up the laptop and tried talking directly to the camera over an ethernet cable.

We were balanced on a lattice of boards spanning the rickety structure of the barn. I offered a number of unhelpful suggestions while Bruce, crouched in a joint-cramping position, wrestled with the Windows Networking Wizard.

After 40 minutes or so of frustration, we declared the camera an undefeated champion and closed the laptop.

Bruce carefully repacked the bucket, aiming the camera away from the intrusive wall, and we left the barn.

Postscript: The phone company came, the phone company repaired and the camera resumed sending photos mid-day Monday. Even better, Bruce succeeded in aiming it correctly: the barn wall disappeared.

Tags: Half Moon Bay, PCC.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 9:38 am and is filed under PCC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.