Marshall Fire Update

The Marshall fire on Dec 30th devastated the communities of Louisville and Superior. This is our community and we’re thankful most people are physically safe. The rebuilding process will be difficult and I know our community will build back stronger.

It’s heartbreaking to watch the fire advance through Superior on the camera. It looks like the office building has survived so at some point the Superior cam will be back.

The Louisville camera went offline early in the morning on the 30th due to the winds that were bad even at that early. The fire was just west of the barn visible in the image and luckily the host site was spared. We should be able to get the camera up and running again at some point.

New cam in Nederland

I’ve been looking for a good Nederland location for a while and when Nick from Busey Brews contacted me it was a great fit. He was a fan of the Boulder Flatiron Cam before moving to Colorado and liked the idea of adding a Nederland cam. Nick and his brother Kyle own Busey Brews Smokehouse and Brewery in Nederland. Over the last few months we’ve been planning the new cam and it’s all come together recently.

The camera has PTZ capability so we can take in a variety of views. The tour may be updated based on feedback, so let us know what you think. [email protected] If you’re interested in adding a cam at another location or sponsoring one of the existing cameras, please reach out.

Please like and subscribe to the new cam on Youtube.

A daytime sample is below, see the live cam here

Time-lapse and archive back

With the pretty fall sunsets recently I was missing the time-lapse and archive feature.  It’s been down since moving to the new server for some technical reasons.  I’ve focused on figuring out this function and getting things going again over the last few weeks and I’m please to share that it’s working again for the Louisville and Superior cams.

Hopefully, I can implement it on the Boulder Cam in the near future.   The Digital Ocean server has been doing great and with the combination of Cloudflare, it’s kept the operating costs manageable.  Check out this stat from Cloudflare

Boulder cam fix in progress

You may have noticed the Boulder cam has not been updating for a couple weeks.  The main problem has been a result of depending on network access from a construction cam co-located on the roof.  That cam was shut down with completion of the building across the street and unexpectedly the network switch also stopped working.   I have several alternatives set up and have to get on the roof sometime this week or next.  I expect we should have a good long-term solution up and running again by early December.

Website update

The timelapse feature was recently re-enabled for the Superior and Louisville cameras.  The move to new hosting has been challenging and expensive.  The camera images have a high number of requests daily and that eats up a lot of bandwidth. I’m using the Cloudflare CDN and will be working on caching techniques to reduce the cost of hosting this site.  

If anyone would like to donate to keep the cameras running or volunteer to provide Linux admin services, I’d love the help!

Tough week for the cams

All three of the cams have been down over the past two days, this is pretty unusual.  The Superior cam had a hardware failure and needs to be sent in for work.  The Louisville cam lost network access and had to be restarted.  And tonight the intense storm that rolled through Boulder knocked the downtown Boulder cam offline.  I think there was a power outage downtown so hopefully the cam will come back up with the Galvanize network and power.  I’ll be out of town a few days so I hope that’s the case!

New site launched

Hi Boulder Flatiron Cam friends and followers.  The updated site design was launched today with lots of afternoon showers for your viewing pleasure.  The downtown Boulder cam at Galvanize is also live with the new site layout.   If anyone has feedback about the new layout please comment or send us an email to info at boulderflatironcam.com

Some highlights of the new layout.

• The home page images are smaller so more cams can be added as we find locations.   If you have a good view with internet service, drop us a line.
• Full size images are now on dedicated pages for each camera.
• On each cam page the timelapse and archives are easier to access and select different dates
• The live images on all pages now auto update ever 30 seconds.  You can leave the cam up and watch the changing weather.
• Archive images are now displayed in a gallery format where it’s easy to access the images and scroll through images from each day.
• Other Boulder cams page is a short list of cams located in Boulder County, but not affiliated with this site.
• Please give us a like or share if you like the new design!

Site Design Update

In the next few days we’ll be launching an updated site design.  You can review here at the /blog link from the current site.  The new site has auto-updating images so you can leave the site up and watch the weather change through the day.  It also launches the new downtown Boulder cam located at Galvanize and supported by OpenSnow.com.

Access to the cam archives and timelapse for each camera should be improved.  You can easily click through the archive gallery now and the calendar selector should make it easier to go back to view days in the past.

I’d love to hear feedback on the new layout or other ideas for the site.  If anyone has a good location around Boulder county I’m interested in setting up more live cams.

New Airport Express

The old wireless bridge for the boulder flatiron cam failed again.  We installed a new Apple Airport Express today and things seem to be humming along now.

The new downtown Boulder cam has been having issues with the heat.  It has to be sent back the manufacturer again to have the image processing board replaced.  I hope to have it back by later next week.