An eye on the charger

I've found that sometimes, in the middle of charging up my bike batteries, the charger cuts out. I think this is caused by too much load on the power supplies that I'm driving them with. It's easily dealt with, I just power-cycle the power supplies and all is fine.

But if I don't know it's happened, I can't do that. And the charging is done in the garage, all the way downstairs from my office.

Technology to the rescue. I've installed a webcam, pointing at the chargers, running off a computer that was already there, using "streamer", which is installed in Red Hat Linux by "yum install xawtv", not an obvious phrase. It means that I have a picture like this:

which refreshes as often as I want it to. I can see the two chargers, and although I can't read the displays, I can see whether they are on or off, which is all I want.


And I just wanted to share with you how dogs and cats teach their young

I had to clean my screen after I watched this.