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[phill.butte]

I've used the DCS-930L to upload images to Weather Underground (wunderground.com) for several years using FTP, it's a great built-in feature. I recently decided to upgrade the resolution of the images by replacing one of the cameras with a DCS-2132L. Unfortunately, the DCS-2132L has two bugs (features?) in the firmware that, taken together, prevent the camera from using FTP to upload an image to the root directory of an FTP site as required by Weather Underground both in the current DCS-2132L Firmware Version (1.02.00) and the previous one:
1. The camera's FTP function will not work if the "Remote Folder Name" field starts with a slash "/", you will get a "Test Error" with no explanation.
2. There is an edit in the configuration page for setting up a server that requires at least one character in the "Remote Folder Name" field. You do get a explanation for that but you can't circumvent it.

Does anyone know of a workaround for this issue (e.g., a special character in the "Remote Folder Name" field that would get around the camera configuration edit but not screw up the FTP server on the other end). I've had to set up an intermediate FTP server to relay the photos from the camera to Weather Underground but I shouldn't have to do that. The built-in FTP client was supposed to make the process simple!

While I'm complaining, here's two more problems:
1. It took 6 hours of testing to figure out the problem. Having the camera just say "Test Error" is not helpful. No notes in the log, no indication if it was a communications issue, bad login, internal edit, error messages from the FTP session, nothing!
2. In "Event Setup/Media" if I select the checkbox for "Add date and time suffix to file name" I get a file name like "image20131022_081145_1839.jpg". If I deselect the checkbox I should get "image.jpg", instead I get something like "image1382453145_1326.jpg". I've seen others complain about this, I'll add mine to them.

[mike88ag]

Any updates on this issue? I also purchased the DCS-2132L for the sole purpose of uploading images to Weather Underground. I'm very disappointed that I haven't been able to make it work.

[phill.butte]

No new firmware, so the DCS-2132L is still uploading the photos to a subdirectory on the weather computer (using Filezilla FTP server on the computer) and then using a BAT file scheduled with Windows Task Scheduler to FTP the photo to WUnderground every 10 minutes. The BAT file also moves the photo to another directory so I have a history of the photos sent. I have another BAT file that runs once a week and clears out the history directory of photos more than one week old. The directory I use is c:\WUnderground. The sub-directory that the DCS-2132L puts the photo in is c:\WUnderground\CAM1

The BAT file below creates a text file called "ftpcmd.dat"with a series of FTP commands, and then feeds the text file into FTP. After that it moves the photos into the history subdirectory and them deletes the "ftpcmd.dat" text file.

@echo off
echo user YourUserNameHere> c:\WUnderground\ftpcmd.dat
echo YourPasswordHere>> c:\WUnderground\ftpcmd.dat
echo bin>> c:\WUnderground\ftpcmd.dat
echo mput c:\WUnderground\CAM1\*.jpg>> c:\WUnderground\ftpcmd.dat
echo quit>> c:\WUnderground\ftpcmd.dat
ftp -n -i -s:c:\WUnderground\ftpcmd.dat webcam.wunderground.com
move /Y c:\WUnderground\CAM1\*.* c:\WUnderground\CAM1_History
del c:\WUnderground\ftpcmd.dat

[davepmp]

I entered "test" as the path (without quotation marks) and I am successfully uploading.

[phill.butte]

Dave,
Is WU actually displaying the photos using the "test" directory? One thing I noticed about the 2132L is that it will pass the "Test" function without WU actually accepting the file for display. Or, you could be putting your photos into a "test" sub-directory on WU's FTP server. If the WU display program is going into sub-directories to get photos it's an undocumented feature that I wasn't aware of.

[davepmp]

WU is displaying the photos.  I didn't expect this to work when I tried it, given WU's instructions, but somehow it did.  I haven't validated where on WU's FTP server the photo is being saved, but I can confirm that the photos are being displayed and updated on WU's site.  I'm not sure if my use of the word "test" for the path is of any signficance, and I don't recall entering a preceding slash in the Path field, so I doubt it's creating a directory.  I didn't create a directory on the WU FTP site before attempting this, either...just blind luck.  I'll try to provide more information when I return home later today.  Until then, here is a link to the WU web page:

http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/NorthJax/1/show.html

[RYAT3]

Dave,
Is WU actually displaying the photos using the "test" directory? One thing I noticed about the 2132L is that it will pass the "Test" function without WU actually accepting the file for display. Or, you could be putting your photos into a "test" sub-directory on WU's FTP server. If the WU display program is going into sub-directories to get photos it's an undocumented feature that I wasn't aware of.

Test button uploads a pain text file, not an image.

[RYAT3]

I've used the DCS-930L to upload images to Weather Underground (wunderground.com) for several years using FTP, it's a great built-in feature. I recently decided to upgrade the resolution of the images by replacing one of the cameras with a DCS-2132L. Unfortunately, the DCS-2132L has two bugs (features?) in the firmware that, taken together, prevent the camera from using FTP to upload an image to the root directory of an FTP site as required by Weather Underground both in the current DCS-2132L Firmware Version (1.02.00) and the previous one:
1. The camera's FTP function will not work if the "Remote Folder Name" field starts with a slash "/", you will get a "Test Error" with no explanation.
2. There is an edit in the configuration page for setting up a server that requires at least one character in the "Remote Folder Name" field. You do get a explanation for that but you can't circumvent it.

Does anyone know of a workaround for this issue (e.g., a special character in the "Remote Folder Name" field that would get around the camera configuration edit but not screw up the FTP server on the other end). I've had to set up an intermediate FTP server to relay the photos from the camera to Weather Underground but I shouldn't have to do that. The built-in FTP client was supposed to make the process simple!

While I'm complaining, here's two more problems:
1. It took 6 hours of testing to figure out the problem. Having the camera just say "Test Error" is not helpful. No notes in the log, no indication if it was a communications issue, bad login, internal edit, error messages from the FTP session, nothing!
2. In "Event Setup/Media" if I select the checkbox for "Add date and time suffix to file name" I get a file name like "image20131022_081145_1839.jpg". If I deselect the checkbox I should get "image.jpg", instead I get something like "image1382453145_1326.jpg". I've seen others complain about this, I'll add mine to them.

Don't use a forward slash on this camera.

[davepmp]

I can confirm that I set the Remote Folder field on the camera to test with no slash preceding or following it.  I can also confirm that this is creating a subdirectory named test on the Wunderground FTP server into which the webcam image is being temporarily stored until the Wunderground server reads and then deletes it.  I have been sucessfully uploading this way since my original post without receiving any errors.  I doubt it makes any difference what word you enter in that field as long as it is a valid name for a folder and you don't use a slash or leave it blank.

[pkcosgrove]

I am using the DCS-2330L once I replaced the "/" with "test" it started working for me as well!

[pkcosgrove]

I have been uploading to wundergound for several days now. I have it set to upload an image every two minutes. It does this most of the time but sometimes it seems to stop uploading or being received. I will look at wunderground and the camera is not longer visible or I will click on the image and it says it was last updated 30 minutes (or some other value more than 2 minutes) I can still see my camera on myd-link so I know it is working. I check again later and it seems to be back online. Is the problem on my end (not uploading) or wunderground) not receiving?

[phill.butte]

pkcosgrove, there's two possible answers. First, WU doesn't really like you to upload that often. It thinks something is wrong and shuts you down for awhile. Try every 10 minutes. Second, the WU uploader is notoriously buggy. It goes up and down frequently. Last year they even lost their entire historical archive of web cam photos.

[mkhattak]

Believe it or not, some of us still have these cameras as they were dirt cheap on Amazon a few years ago. They haven't updated  the firmware in a long time, but, I got the FTP service to work as well with an Ubuntu VSFTPD service. It took a bunch of researching and this thread was the best at getting me close. After you set up your FTP service on an Ubuntu Server (if that is what you use), the settings have to be cleared out on both sides. When you enter a server address, keep it for the URL IP address with nothing else (e.g., 192.168.1.x), Port should be 21 (haven't tried with other port numbers) username and password is  what you created on the FTP server, and the remote folder name that worked for was, no slash, followed by the directory (e.g., home/ftpuser) I had to restart my FTP service after watching the successful authentication in the var/log/vsftpd.log. But, after restarting VSFTPD service, it tested a push to the directory with a test.txt file. Once that got uploaded, it successfully returned a green good text. Hope that is helpful.