What is the Travel Cam?

This page is a little outdated but we are leaving it here for info about the past videos. We now have a different motorhome and different camera setup.

If you’ve arrived here, you’re probably wondering what the “Travel Cam” page is. Being that we are Geeky Nomads, we thought it would be pretty cool to use our mobile internet connection, cameras and some custom made hardware to provide a live feed of our travels. The only issue of course is that we travel only on Sundays so that is when the page is active. The watch us roll page is updated every 5 seconds for up to 10 minutes (you have to refresh the page after that) and will constantly show an updated list of stuff.

Front Camera

Front Camera

A pair of analog CCTV cameras are installed on our roof that connect via CAT5 baluns through a roof mounted cable gland manifold into the front A/V area of our RV. From there a CCTV card is in a linux box and some custom made software captures images from these cameras and uploads them to the site. The linux box also captures our current location via a bluetooth QStarz GPS receiver.

QStarz Bluetooth GPS

QStarz Bluetooth GPS

Finally a kind man named Steve Bennett whose website is here has detailed his long travels into the Ford EEC-IV diagnostic connector and using his free detailed information and software I duplicated his interface in order to access real-time data parameters from my RV engine. My interface looks a lot like this

Using this data link I am able to show coolant temperature, air intake temperature, speed and engine RPM at any given time. This may be a bit over the top, but I thought well we have the data, lets log it. And if we’re logging the data, why not show it. It should be entertaining to watch the engine temps rise as we climb the Rocky’s.

Steve's EECIV Interface - Mine is Similar

Steve's EECIV Interface - Mine is Similar