The webcam is located in Squamish, British Columbia, and looks south from an elevation of approximately 140m (460 feet) towards the Stawamus Chief mountain.
As well as the Chief, the webcam looks out towards the Sea to Sky Highway, which runs from Vancouver to Whistler, BC, and the Howe Sound, a network of fiords to the north of Vancouver.
The webcam is a Dahua IPC-HFW8232E-Z IP camera that uses a large Sony Exmor sensor. The camera is able to produce a bright image even on an overcast night. On a clear night, the camera can see several hundred stars, as well as aircraft and bright satellites.
A custom-written software stack monitors and adjusts the camera settings to produce the best quality image, generates multiple adaptive streams to suit a wide range of devices, and automatically generates a timelapse movie of the previous day every night.
Live weather information is collected from a weather station adjacent to the camera, and is updated automatically every few seconds.
In the early days of the Internet, webcams used to be almost magical. They gave the ability to see a live view of another part of the world whenever you wanted, with just the click of a mouse.
Unfortunately, while the Internet has changed almost beyond recognition in the last 25 years, webcams have, for the most part, remained almost stagnant. Today, you can watch a new series on Netflix in 4K resolution on your phone, but most webcams still provide a dull, postage-stamp picture, that might update once every minute if you're lucky, and that show nothing but a black square at night.
I wanted to take advantage of living in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, British Columbia, and build a webcam that could show a large, smoothly-updating video of the view, both during the day and at night.
