Projects Possible

Here on Projects Possible I run multiple webcams and they are all on a single PC.  The Pan and Tilt camera runs a server that allows remote web control of that camera.  The others run in a “capture” program that grabs the images and uploads them to the blog on a periodic basis.   The problem is when Windows starts it just grabs all of the programs that need to run and starts running them one after another.  In order to accomplish what I needed to do I needed to get the server running first and THEN I would start the image capture.   If I didn’t do this I would get conflicts on startup and the server or the capture would display blank images. 

My solution…Create a batch file and put it into my STARTUP folder that runs the programs I want to run in the order and with the timing that I want them to run.

Relatively simple solution.   I created a file with an editor called WebCam.BAT in the All User/Programs/Startup folder.   The basics of this file are:

@ECHO OFF  

ECHO Pausing to wait for Windows to get through standard startup routines...

PING -n91 127.0.0.1>nul

START \"PanTilt\" /B \"C:\path to MCAM software\"

Ping -n61 127.0.0.1>nul

START \"WEBCAM\" /B \"C:\path to webcam capture\"

That’s really it.  Since I needed to have a delay and there isn’t a Pause for XX seconds command for batch files I “cheat” and  just tell it to PING my local machine a sufficient number of times to get the delay I want and send the output of the ping command to nowhere.  You can also find more information on the START command here…