Watchdog for asterisk: implementation (Part VII)

Part VII: Watching the Watchdog

It's good to know if a circuit is functioning properly, so having the LED indicators was very helpful. The LEDs are also nice for showcasing the gadget to other people. Now the watchdog box is located in my garage, and I have been checking on it daily, morning and evening, whenever I am home and not doing much. Who knew that I would become the watchdog for the watchdog!!

The other day I found an old webcam that I bought at a clearance sale. It's a Creative Labs Vista webcam. Though having the name Vista, it predated Windows Vista and in fact is not compatible with it. I had used it for a short while with my XP laptop, but it's been just sitting in the drawer doing nothing. So I thought of (geeky, to be sure) using it to save me some efforts in checking on the watchdog box.

I found a linux driver for the webcam and installed it on the same linux machine that hosts my asterisk telephone server, and there's also a simple webcam GUI program from the same website. The installation was easy, and in just a few minutes I was looking at the watchdog box via a VNC window to the linux machine! Here is a screen cap of the watchdog when it's not detecting a tone:


Here is another screen cap, when a tone is detected:


I suppose my next project will be a video analytics program to monitor the watchdog and send some kind of alert when the watchdog appears not to be functioning ...