Hey guys,

We've had a couple of pretty exciting days and I have been more or less absent for a lot of what has been going on.

Our other job, as Hummingbird, is to fly drones over wildfires. This means that for periods of the summer, I'm lost in the vast British Columbian wilderness without cell reception. Which is where I was for the last two days. If you don't hear back from me right away (e-mail, personal message, message board) it just means that I'm unavailable and I will do my best to get back to you as soon as possible.

Yesterday we had some laughs about a helicopter that was caught mid-picture and used again and again. The reason this happened is because sometimes the cameras stop working. And so, during those periods, we re-rout our calls from the live images to old ones stored in the database. So yesterday, cameras 1 and 3 weren't working. It just so happened that the stale image we were drawing from the database, completely by chance, had a helicopter in it. I'm impressed how many people have been noticing the old time stamps.

We're still working on some bugs internally, but slowly they are being ironed out. We have had to shift our focus from the UI that you guys see to work on some back end stuff, but two features that will be coming (in part, because of popular demand) will be:

1. The ability to return to a previous image
2. The ability to zoom in on an area for closer inspection

We are also thinking about removing the limited visibility button. It isn't well defined and we are worried that it makes the user-interface less intuitive. Basically, it would be, that if the image was blurry, you would just say: no smoke. What are your thoughts?

The best,

Robert

 

@GreenMachine842 anytime man - you guys are going to be what makes this thing work. I'm also having a lot of fun interfacing with y'all.

 

hmm I had an issue with the buttons falling off the screen when I pressed one of them. Not sure what was up with that.

 

Hey @Randomacts were you pressing the smoke button? When you do detect smoke, the idea is that you have to draw a bounding box on the screen around the smoke.

I need to write instructions :emoji_stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

 

Yeah I'm pretty sure that it was just a cloud but the cloud was so low and honestly I wanted to make sure that the button even worked lol

 

Haha, smart. I'm going to work on instructions today - they should be up later.

 

Hey @GoldGuardian - thanks for the note. Are you able to verify that they are the same images based on the time-stamp?

The system is running right now from five cameras located on one tower. Basically we should be seeing the same 5 images every 5 minutes. From one picture to the next, we won't see a lot of change - mostly changes in weather.

Occasionally, the cameras will break down and so we start pulling old images from the database to replace the images that would otherwise be present.

It becomes a problem if the cameras aren't broke down, and all 5 images are pulled from the database rather than the cameras. Which is where my question about the time stamp comes from. If all 5 images have old time-stamps, then we def have a problem.

Talk soon,

R

 

No problem - we will be adding four new cameras over the next month! Stay tuned ;)

 

Your servers are offline right now apparently.

This site can’t be reached
www.hummingbirdwatch.ca refused to connect.

http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/hummingbirdwatch.ca.html

 

Crap! Our re-direct server just went down.

We are doing some work today adding new cameras. I might make a new forum post.

Thanks for the heads up @Randomacts

 

It looks like it might be back up again but obviously you are having some issues.