Visual Basic

Timelapse thumbnailing and remote monitoring utility

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This recent project was developed to control a timelapse capture of a large machinery installation project, running 24/7 over a 6 week period.

Two high-res digital still cameras were set up to each capture one image of the construction every minute. An 802.11g wireless network connected each camera to a central PC running the timelapse utility, which was responsible for organising the storage of the images into logical folders, and generating thumbnails of the images. The thumbnails were then uploaded via FTP with an accompanying web page to a web server, where they could be checked remotely.

A second utility, running at another site would check that the uploaded data was arriving as expected, and if not, phone an alert through to the project supervisor.

Both applications were written using Visual Basic 6.

Keyword Indexing / Searching System

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The keyword indexer came out of a need to have a web site delivered on a CD-ROM. As the CD -ROM format precluded the ability to have any server-side site search functionality, we needed to develop a client-side application that would allow the site stored on the CD-ROM to be searched for keywords.

This Visual Basic application allows a site to be scanned for keywords, which are indexed, ranked for relevance and exported to a self-contained JavaScript file which can simply be included into a 'search' page within the disk-based web site.

All the JavaScript code is automatically generated by the application, and file descriptions can be automatically extracted from meta-tags within the scanned documents.

The final search page can provide ranked results from multiple keywords as well as file descriptions for the matched files.