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LOOKING THROUGH THE INTERNET

A Prototype Security System
by Skylar Lei, Jim Haslett, and Mike Smith

Start • Web Server Choice • Interactive GUI • Video System • Remote Camera System • Control RF Link • Solar Power Module • • Sources

INTERACTIVE GUI

The camera control GUI is browser-driven to allow control by both base-station and remote users. The GUI consists of two different interactive web pages that access CGI scripts, written in Perl, to receive and process information.

Photo 1—The main HTML page lets us view the video stream.

The HTML page generated by main.pl is essentially the gateway to the remote security system (see Photo 1). It displays buttons to identify camera-specific locations. Users can select an individual camera, shut down cameras, or customize camera names through this page.

Listing 3 shows how to monitor the user selection of a camera, and pass the information to the video switching module. When the user selects a camera, a new window pops up that displays the moving images supplied by the InetCAM applet. The user can go to an editing page to reinitialize the camera names. As shown in Listing 4, the new names are stored in the file names.txt and will be retrieved the next time the main page is fired up again.

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