[Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Fettuccine is a small app that allows you to collect a set of links to webcam sites, and browse through those webcams quickly and easily. It also allows you to quickly link to each webcam's home page, and has a customized refresh rate for each webcam.

Webcams can be tagged with identifiers for use in creating categories (such as "Beaches", "Mountains", or "Volcanoes"). The main webcam list can be filtered by these tags.

Webcams are entered into Fettuccine via an XML file. As of the current version (0.8), the XML format is a bit sparse, and I don't yet have a DTD for it. You can see an example of the syntax by examining the default Fettuccine xml file:

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Fettuccine/fettuccine.xml

(This file can be loaded directly into Fettuccine via the "Import Webcam List" option in the drop-down menu.)

Also, please note that when a new XML file is loaded, all previous webcams are removed. I will hopefully have a more convenient method of adding new webcams in the future!

A screenshot: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jp...ldFaithful.png

As of version 0.9, Fettuccine can now also run as a homescreen widget:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jp...es/Widgets.png

A short overview video of Fettuccine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0URUZZ50s7o

Fettuccine is a free and open-source project, released under the Gnu GPL (version 2 or later, at your option). You can find the source code at Github:

https://github.com/jpietrzak8/Fettuccine

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Thanks for this very useful application.
I have setup an XML file with local traffic cameras, very useful for avoiding traffic in the morning.

A couple of comments.

Firstly the icon is the stock Qt image in HAM, I guess the uuencoded image in the control file was the wrong one?

Lastly I seem to have had the devices watchdog kick in and reboot if Fettuccine is left running for a long period of time, maybe 20 minutes or so (was the only thing running at the time). Only done it once so maybe I'll keep an eye on it for now.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

I'm glad to hear that you were able to use the XML file! :) I'm still trying to figure out a way to more easily add webcams into the app. So far, the best I've been able to come up with is to provide a field in which the user could paste an address. (And this would only work on the N900; Qt doesn't yet support cut and paste on Android. :( )

Ack! And I was kind of proud of my most recent foray into vector graphics; I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of this "icon" thing. :) Let me go ahead and push an update with my icon...

Ah, I can believe that. I threw this thing together in a very short period of time, and haven't really tested it much at all; I could believe that there are memory leaks or such. I'll see if I can't clean it up a bit. Thanks!

New Fettuccine icon:

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Well seen as it's easier to edit the XML file on my Desktop and then SCP it over...maybe a good idea would be an option to get the XML file from a location on the web.
Also if the application reloaded the file on startup if more cameras were added it would update it and add them.
You could then subscribe to a XML "channel" in a way.

I may test out the tag and tag filter by adding more cameras in a different county with different tags, when i get a moment.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Can't the xml be edited from the application itself?
I mean we should have a repository with possible cams and a way to browse this repository in fettuccine and add them to the list of saved cams.

The repository packages / webcam can be a simple text file with all info needed and fettuccine should append "downloaded" cams to it's "saved" cams. I am aware of the limitations like: Who can host, how can users contribute with own cams, how to make sure the host just doesn't dissappear?

Another idea: maybe there should be a sort of import dialog/wizard which can append all needed strings to the xml? Like that dialog in HAM, the way you can add repositories HAM.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

I wonder if it could be persuaded to import official xml feeds, such as TfL's? http://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data...on-this-page-3

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

and

That does sound like a better way to do it! :) Hmm. I think it would be easy enough to implement a UI for this, but I'm not really sure what would be the best way to handle the server side of things. As you say,

A Maemo.org wiki page might be a possibility; the Fettuccine Github wiki page might work as well... But yeah, I'm not sure I know of a perfect solution for serving files like these. :( At the very least, I suppose it'd be useful to let folks retrieve these files from private servers...

Well, I actually started out trying to do it that way, but got frustrated with just how much typing was involved; many of these webcam links tend to be long and chock-full of machine-readable gunk. (If I could get cut and paste working better, it might be bearable...)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Wow! I didn't know anybody offered webcam feeds like that. And yeah, it looks like it would be possible to pull all the webcam links right off of their XML. On the other hand, they've got a lot of terms and conditions...

And there are some requirements that I doubt I can meet, such as:

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Would be awesome if I could input live surf cam feeds for my local surf spots. Definitely like the traffic cam idea too.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Another thought - desktop widget? Combined with Calendar Home and OMWeather, a couple of traffic cams con a desktop could be the perfect "today" screen to check when getting ready in the morning...

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Fettuccine should be able to work with any of the classic "one image every few seconds" types of webcam. The more modern "live video" webcams seem to either be using flash, or some proprietary video format; I'm not sure whether I'd be able to come up with a client for those.

Anyway, if you've got a link to a website with a webcam you'd like to see in Fettuccine, I can throw together some Fettuccine XML for it...

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

I think I could do that; from what I've seen so far, Fettuccine doesn't use much memory and almost no CPU. (Well, except when displaying an animated GIF file. I don't yet know why it runs the CPU so hard when on an animated GIF...)

But I'd think that shrinking these webcam images down even further would make things a bit hard to see. :) The widget would probably have to take up a lot of space to be useful, wouldn't it? (I suppose it'd be possible to vary the size...)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Hi all,
I installed the app, and it works fine.

I added a new line to the xml file on first post:

The image loads fine as expected but I have a notification popup saying:

But It's not a bad issue, the application is just great.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

I see that you've set the refresh rate to 2 seconds; I've been noticing that when I set the refresh rate that low, Fettuccine seems to start having trouble retrieving images. :(

Testing from a browser on my desktop, it looks as though the ulaval.ca webcam does update that quickly (although even Chrome starts glitching if I keep hitting "refresh" fast enough :) ). I'll take a look to see if there's anything I can improve in the image retrieval code, but for now, Fettuccine might work better with a slower refresh rate (maybe 5 seconds or so)...

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Ah, but if it's hooked up to a 40" TV it's a different matter...

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Alright, I've finally managed to create a Maemo homescreen widget. :) Version 0.9.0 of Fettuccine is now making its way up to Extras-Devel, and should hopefully allow you to run it as a widget; at least, it is working for me. :)

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jp...es/Widgets.png

Some notes: (a) While Fettuccine uses very little CPU, it does take up a bit of memory (top reports a bit less than 10% for most of my testing). So, it wouldn't take too many desktop widget instances to eat up all your ram. :) (It may be possible to drive multiple views from a single Fettuccine executable, but it doesn't look pretty; Maemo seems to favor the "one widget, one view" policy...)

(b) This is my first ever Maemo homescreen widget, so I'm absolutely positive there will be bugs. Please be patient with me! :)

(c) I don't really use widgets for, well, anything on my N900s. I'm sure there are general conventions on usage and UI design that I'm missing. :) Right now, each widget can be modified via a dialog box that comes up when you hit the little "wrench" icon that comes up after a long-press on the screen (or, I guess, double-click the screen and then click the gear icon that drops down). From this dialog box you can access most of the same controls that are available on the Fettuccine menu, as well as change the size of the widget. Hopefully, this will be sufficient for playing around with the widget for now...

Some implementation notes: the "qt4-homescreen-loader" package makes widget generation very easy. In fact, it makes it easy to create an app that doubles as a widget, which is what I have in fact done with Fettuccine. If you pass it the command-line argument "--runAsApp", Fettuccine will start up as a normal app; otherwise, it will attempt to start running as a widget. (As it turns out, I couldn't use the argument "--runAsWidget", because there appears to be no way to pass arguments to a widget...) There are some annoying stumbling blocks as well; all of the standard Maemo widgets set the attribute "X-Multiple-Instances=false" in their .desktop files. Since I wanted to allow multiple instances, I set that attribute to true in my .desktop file. This was completely useless, as it turns out actual attribute is just "X-Multiple"; so, that line in all the standard widgets is just a no-op. :( I spent a few frustrating hours trying to figure out that one... Another subtle issue is that if your widget brings up a dialog box (such as for the settings), you must not give that dialog box a parent pointer. If you set the widget as the dialog's parent, mouse events will get scattered among the various objects on the screen rather than being focussed on the dialog box. (This is apparently a side effect of the technique that "qt4-homescreen-loader" uses to communicate with the Hildon desktop.)

So, anyway, hopefully this will be a useful and enjoyable addition to the Fettuccine app. :)

EDIT: A little youtube video with a quick overview of Fettuccine:

http://youtu.be/0URUZZ50s7o

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

looks awsome:) though i do not find any use for your app:D

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Indeed! :) But I do sometimes enjoy creating apps that don't seem very useful. ;)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

@nokiabot: what about surveillance camera in your home, office or celebrity you chose to stalk ?

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

dont worry i will find some use as this app must be something awsome as it comes from copernicuss;)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

The .xml parser generates an error when loading a file that has this = sign in the web address, such as

homepage="http://www.intellicast.com/National/Radar/Current.aspx?location=USAL0371&animate=true"

This is a handy program! The filter function was a very useful feature.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Ah, my apologies; this is actually an issue of my use of XML (and I really need to document it somewhere!). XML treats a handful of characters as special (these include &, ", ', <, and > ). The XML parser is really complaining that the & operator in the above link is followed by an equals sign rather than by a trailing semicolon. You can tell the XML parser that you want an actual ampersand by using the & operator itself with the name "amp":

&amp;

So, the link would then become:

homepage="http://www.intellicast.com/National/Radar/Current.aspx?location=USAL0371&amp;animate=true"

(BTW, here's a nice wiki page that describes this much better than I can...)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Great application, very useful to check meteo images!
In case of radar images, it would be nice that the web link definition would handle date tags (%Y%m%d...) to pick updated images.
PS.
but probably not really needed since most pages that use date tags have also some other folder pattern not easy to guess automatically..

If you like meteosat images, here a nice set for europe:
http://www.meteosatonline.it/animazione_visibile.php

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Wow. I just spent a few minutes browsing the net for Meteo images; I'm not sure just where you're finding anything that Fettuccine could actually parse. :) The meteosatonline.it site only provides its data as PHP files; I suppose they are using some sort of HTML5 mechanism underneath that? I checked out the Eumetsat website, but their files are all encoded in JFIF format (which is related to JPG in some manner), and they don't seem to want people to view individual images in any case. The only site I've found so far with straight-up single Meteosat images is the NOAA website, and they only have full-disk images updated four times a day...

Well, that's one nice thing about having a pocket computer, it isn't too hard to throw together little algorithms for these kinds of things. :) But yeah, you do kind of need the image provider to have some sort of standardized structure to their data. I've gotta say, the NOAA site does do a great job of providing image data in a standard manner with a minimal amount of extra cruft on top of it; I dunno if there is a Meteo site that has as convenient a format...

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/datapoin...r-capabilities

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/datapoin...r-capabilities

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/datapoin...-documentation

A quick glance suggests they all provide PNGs, though may need some sort of map over- or underlay.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

@copernicus
sorry for the mess, in fact i was evaluating many meteo sites and i posted probably the worst one...
To pick the images for fettuccine i'm using this one:
http://oiswww.eumetsat.org/IPPS/html/latestImages.html

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

This looks... complicated. :) I think this is more of a professional service oriented towards folks trying to create actual weather prediction applications. I don't think Fettuccine is the right target for this sort of data. :) (Are there any significant weather apps for the N900? I've never really looked for one myself...)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Ah, perfect! This is exactly the sort of data that works with Fettuccine. (Heck, it might even be possible to parse the links straight off of that page...) They seem to have a Fettuccine-friendly distribution policy as well, so long as you set your refresh rate correctly. (For this data, it appears that new images are mostly added once per hour, so you don't need a refresh rate faster than that...)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

For what it's worth, I've made a first pass at encoding (some of) the Eumetsat "latest images" page into the current Fettuccine XML format. I've concentrated mostly on the infrared and visible-light images. You can find a link to it here:

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Fettuccine/eumetsat.xml

You can either type that link into Fettuccine and have it download the file, or copy the file manually to your N900 and load it from there. These images get updated roughly once an hour. Looks like it's been a rainy day in most of Europe today. :)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

@Copernicus
thank you! ...but i have to report a little bug.
Once you have a fettuccine widget active, while the phone is not connected to any internet connection, at every image update you will find the ICD dialog "Choose a connection"

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Yeah, I just noticed that myself yesterday. :) I really do need to put a little more effort into managing Fettuccine's internet usage; I basically just set it up by making a call to Qt's default network manager and leaving all the error handling management on default settings. (I've gotta admit that the defaults are really quite good, though...)

I'll try to make Fettuccine a little quieter about network problems in the next update. :)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Does Fettuccine carry on updating the images while the screen is locked or off?

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Yes, it does (so far as I know); I haven't put in any code to determine the state of the screen. I guess I hadn't really planned on leaving it up and running all the time, but that would make sense if you leave it as a widget, wouldn't it... :)

Hmm. Would it be better to shut Fettuccine off completely when the screen is dark, or perhaps give it a very slow refresh rate instead? It might be nice to have a relatively up-to-date image ready when you bring the screen back up... Although forcing the user to wait for a refresh shouldn't be too much of a hassle.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

You can connect to a DBus signal from MCE that is emitted when the screen is (un)locked. That way, you can suspend updates when the screen is locked and update the image immediately when the screen is unlocked.

I use a small Screen class is some of my applications to handle this:

https://github.com/marxoft/cuteradio...aemo5/screen.h
https://github.com/marxoft/cuteradio...mo5/screen.cpp

QMaemo5HomescreenAdaptor also has a homescreenChanged(bool) signal, though I don't know if this is emitted when the screen is (un)locked.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Thanks! I will check for that signal, then (especially as I don't have a QMaemo5HomescreenAdaptor around when Fettuccine is running as an app :) ).

BTW, another newbie question here: I've just been browsing the documentation a bit, and along with the screen lock signal, there appears to be a screen "status" signal (with values for "on", "dimmed", and "off"):

http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/5.0-fi...ba2daba3e609e1

Would you know if "on" and "off" for this signal are identical to "locked" and "unlocked" for the tklock mode signal, or can the screen go dark without being in "locked" mode? (I seem to recall situations where the screen was dark but still detected when I touched it...)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

The screen can be off without being locked if 'Lock screen automatically' is disabled in the settings. I'm not sure if the display_status_ind signal is emitted alongside the tklock_mode_ind signal if the screen is locked manually. To be honest, I didn't actually read the documentation before implementing my solution. :o For the purpose of suspending/resuming UI updates, it makes sense to respond to the screen being off/on as well as locked/unlocked.

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Alright, version 0.9.1 is now making its way up to extras-devel. This version will now check the DBus signals to see when the screen goes dark, and stop updating the image until the screen comes back up again. :)

Also, it will catch signals from the Qt Network Access Manager and stop updating the image if the network becomes unavailable. I've also got it catching the signal for when the network becomes available again, but that signal doesn't seem to be sent until you wake the manager up yourself. (Which kind of negates the whole point of a signal...)

To get around this, I've added an extra check to the screen signal handler; when the screen comes back on, it also gives the network manager a little push (if the network had been down before). So, you can turn the screen off and on again in order to get Fettuccine running again. I'll try to find a better way around this problem. :)

Also in this update, I've cleaned up the UI a bit (particularly the widget settings dialog). As always, beware new bugs! :)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

I have a webcam at home that is accessible via https on a non-standard port and with a self-signed certificate, and protected via .htaccess username/password

What's the chance that I can get this to work? ;)

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

Hmm... Actually, Qt has authentication support built-in to their network access manager (which only makes sense, given how important security is on the net). That said, I've never myself worked with authenticating network requests before, so I'm not really familiar with how it's done. So really, the only holdup here is me; all the code needed to access your webcam should already be on your N900. :) Let me take a look...

Re: [Announce] Fettuccine - A webcam aggregator app
 

@Copernicus
it would be nice to have support for ipcameras into fettuccine.
Since you love xml... ;) .... here you can find a lot of url patterns for many ipcameras:
https://ispyconnect.googlecode.com/s...ML/Sources.xml
(i'm using the Foscam cameras with other apps and url definition are correct)

One side note. Do you think you could add a tag into the widget saying date and time of last successful update and an on-click action?