SnowCam Technical Information and Frequently Asked Questions

Where is the camera?
The camera is located in a barn south west of the town of Mount Shasta.

How are these pictures made?
The camera is a Canon ES75 camcorder. Every 30 seconds a low resultion and high resolution image is captured on a FreeBSD unix system. The frames are capturing with an AVerMedia video card using Camserv. Every 20 frames (10 minutes) a movie is created using mpeg_encode. Every 10 minutes the current lowres, highres, and mpeg are sent to the snowcrest web server.

How are the temperature graphs made?
The graphs are made using the Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG). This program was originally used to graph utilization of wide area network links, but it is flexible enough to handle mundane things such as temperature.

What is the source of your weather information?
The weather data is collected using a Radio Shack WX200 weather station using software available here.

Are the time stamps accurate?
Yes. The system clock on the snowcam machine is syncronized to world time using NTP. The system time is typically within 10 milliseconds of the reference server which is in turn syncronized with the NIST time servers.

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