Coffee Alarm

Coffee Alarm (v1.0.0)

Would it not be neat if...

As many other program's this program was born with the frase "Would it not be neat if,... we did not have to watch the coffee maker like hawks?".
We were three programmers at Tech@Funcom, and like programmers most, we need our daily dose of caffein to function, and we take out caffein in the form on espresso, made with a nice Bialetti stovetop maker.
The only problem was that we often would forget the pot on the stove, and the espresse would taste awefull when we finaly remembered it.
So we did what we do best; we rigged up a PPro200, installed BeOS and attached a Creative WebCamII camera. We pointed the camera down into the pot and installed a webserver (RobinHood) so that we remotely could check the progress of the coffee.
This worked very well, but it was still to "manual", so we desided that we needed a program to watch the pot, so the Coffee Alarm program was born!

What does it look like / how does it work?

The image at the left side is the last downloaded image.
The top-right black image is the "delta" view and shows what have changed between downloaded frames.
The bottom-right grid show the changes during the last few hundred frames. The left arrow sets the "trigger" level, and the right arrow scales the graph.
At the bottom the status is written in the left side, and a small progress bar is located in the right side. When the progress bar is blue it indicates download progress, and when it's red it shows how long time there is to the next download.

In the config window (not shown) you can set the proxy, and the action that should be taken when a frame changes more that the set "trigger" level, the following actions are possible:

Play sound: The will play the system sound "Coffee Alarm" when a change is detected.
Save frame: Saves the changed frames in the selected path.
Run file: Runs the specifies executable when a change is detected.
If Save frame has been selected, all {FILE}'s are replaced with the name of the saved frame.

So?, I don't drink coffee.

The CoffeeAlert application does a lot more than just watching coffee, here is a few idears for those without there own cameras:

See if Be has changed there famous red and blue sofas: http://www.sakoman.com/codycam/codycam.jpg
Find out if Telenor ever gets there new offices ready: http://www.telenor.no/byggeplassen/fornebu/grafikk/webcam/fbu.jpg
Keep an eye on that nastly looking typhoon, and be ready when it hits: http://www.dnmi.no/varsel/meteosat/msati.jpg
Check out the nice weather in Oslo: http://www.vg.no/kamera/pics/oslo-full.jpg
Take a peek at the gorgeous Jenni: http://www.jennicam.org/guests/cam.jpg
Check if Kurt's parrot falls down from it favorite resting place: http://www.atheos.cx/webcam.jpg

Notes.

The icon was one i found on the net, and I don't know who made it :( so if anybody is willing to make me a new be-style icon, i would be very pleased.