We've set up a web camera to look at the chickens. It seems to be dropping packets -- some when it's mounted outside under the eaves looking at the yard, lots when it's mounted inside the chicken house. I suspect that, because there's no external antenna, the camera suffers more from signal attenuation than my laptop does (where the antenna is in the lid, behind the screen). Even the laptop has less than perfect signal in the chicken house, so that would make sense. Meanwhile, it's dark in the chicken house so even if the signal were great, mostly what we'd see is a black square. This does not get us any closer to seeing the rats getting the eggs and it doesn't actually get video of the chickens out to those curious folks who want to see them chickening around.

I asked my boss, a complete gadget nut, about which wireless webcam to get. His big tip was that getting a webcam set up is still a difficult task for people unfamiliar with setting up a network. This means that there's a high return rate for them that's totally unrelated to their functioning. Mom gets a webcam, plugs it in, and discovers that she can't figure out how to get it to work -- so she returns it.

I scored a refurbished Linksys WVC54GCA with expedited shipping for less than the cost of a brand new one. Sure enough, the camera worked perfectly -- I just had to tell our wireless router to forward port 80 to the camera and like magic, it worked.

Ultimately, I wound up mounting the camera on a post just over the rain barrels. The packet loss is acceptable, around 1%, and the video shows the lower two terraces of the chicken yard. At some point, I think it'd be nice to figure out a way to hook up an external cantenna to the webcam, so we could position it farther from the wireless router. That's a separate project, though, since the current feed seems to delight people.