ericbacrh

@elmer Thanks. This project pretty much taught me how to code in PHP. I'll try and do a write up of the project pretty soon. I'd like to change things around a bit first and take more pictures. Right now it's sitting on the basement floor, but it would be better if it was in an enclosure, especially with the missile launcher coming. I'm going to have to reload that thing every 2 minutes. I'll post when it's online. Hopefully it's just a matter of plug it in and go. I may have the wrong Linux driver, though.

Been working on it for over a year. We upgrade a lot of stuff on it and change things around, so it's a work in process.

Represent!

That is a great idea, I'd definitely pay to shoot at you guys. Don't nerf guns usually require quite significant manual effort to launch though? Like pumping or something, not to mention reloading. If there's a high-capacity electrically-powered nerf launcher that would be suitable. Actually I either never even realised you could donate money or I somehow forgot. Not sure if you've seen my site, but people can control a robot arm and an r/c car + lights in my basement: www.controlourjunk.com Woot had an $18 deal on the USB missile launcher the other night so I bought it and I'm putting it on my site for people to shoot down various stuff (card houses, dominos, etc...). Not sure how you're planning to code it. Everything on my site is controlled via a Linux box connected to a servo controller through serial. PHP is my friend.

Okay, thanks a bunch for the help. Hopefully more people will upgrade from IE6 and find the advantage of using a better browser.

What is the place holder? And does the webcam continue to stream after the next initial image loads? If so, it's fixed.

Hmm, I think that might just work. I need to find an IE machine to test it on, but doing it that way should force a reload of the image right after the xmlhttp request is sent to the server. It can't hurt, so I'll implement it. Edit: Implemented. I see no change for other browsers, so hopefully it fixed the site on IE6. If anyone could confirm if it works, that would be great. Thanks.

That's kind of like what I'm already doing. The image changes without reloading anything else on the page. It looks like they used a time delay, and I'm not sure how that scales with different connections.

Does anyone have a machine with IE6 on it by chance? I'm using all Linux/Mac. If someone could test the current site (www.controlourjunk.com/control.php) with IE6 and let me know how it goes, that would help a lot too. I believe the problem happens when you click buttons to control stuff and the webcam stops loading. Edit: Just read up on browser share. Seems IE6 is down to about 38%, which is great. I've confirmed my site to work in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE7. Maybe I don't need a solution and IE6 browser share will fizzle out as people upgrade.

Yea, I'd like to try and get away from using the onload event, as I think that may be what is causing the issue in IE6. If anyone knows how to smoothly stream jpegs with Ajax, that would be a big help. Like I've said before, I need it to work on a variety of connections.

Thanks =). But the issue is it needs to be as close to realtime as possible. I also have people who are using it from satellite and high-ping connections, so I need it to scale. That's why I found the onload event to work so well. I get quite a bit of complaints that it doesn't work well with IE6, though. The webcam images load fine in IE6 until you click a control button, which sends an XMLHTTP request and somehow stops the flow of webcam images. Maybe I should just hope everyone switches to other browsers or upgrades to IE7/Vista. Why does it seem like Microsoft changes their standards every version of the browser? (I find it differs between versions of IE 6 even!)

Actually, how I'm doing it right now works pretty good in all browsers except IE 6. I put a small delay in (about 500ms), but I use the onload event to trigger it. The next image doesn't display until it's completely loaded, so there is always an image up on the screen. You can check out the site here if you want: www.controlourjunk.com/control.php

I'm trying to find the best solution to this issue. I need to reload a static jpeg on a website as soon as the image finishes loading (basically I want to keep a constant stream of webcam images). One reason for this is I need it to be quick on a fast connection, but degrade for a user on a slow connection. I've been using the <img onload=""> attribute, but it seems it doesn't work too well in older versions of IE when I am sending XMLHTTP requests. I need this solution to work with IE 6, IE 7, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Here's my current code: <img src="cam. jpg" width="320" height="240" name="cam" alt="Webcam Image" onload="Refresh()"> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> <!-- var camsrc="cam. jpg"; function Refresh() { tmp = new Date(); tmp = "?"+tmp. getTime(); document. images["cam"]. src = camsrc+tmp; } // --> </script> Any help would be great.