Cam Depot v1.9

Features in full

Answers "what does it look like there right now" without leaving ATAK. An operator filters to an area, brings the cameras in, taps one for its latest picture, and where the agency publishes a stream, plays it as live video in ATAK's own player.

Capabilities

• About 43,000 cameras, refreshed from the publishing agencies, with roughly 9,000 carrying a playable video stream.
• Filter by state, provider, county, distance from your position or from a point on the map, and by whether a camera streams, is a still, or belongs to a wildfire network. Each filter states what it will cost before it is used.
• "On screen only" narrows the list to the current map view and follows it as the map moves, the way ATAK's Overlay Manager does.
• Search by camera name across every state at once.
• Favorites, kept on the device and spanning states, pinned above the ordinary list rather than replacing it.
• Current still image per camera, fetched straight from the agency by the device, typically less than a minute old.
• Live video where the agency publishes a stream, played by ATAK. Streams are verified as serving before they are published, so a camera that offers video was serving video when the catalog was built.
• Bearing line with its azimuth for cameras that report where they point, following steerable cameras as they slew.
• Operator-set zoom threshold controlling when cameras draw, set by example from the current view or from presets described in plain terms.
• Counties assigned from Census boundaries rather than from the camera feeds, so county filtering works on every camera in the United States.

Data is collected by a publisher that polls each agency once and serves a single catalog, so a device never fetches from twenty-five agencies itself. Camera imagery and video are fetched by the device directly from the agency and do not pass through any takwerx service.

A step-by-step user guide with screenshots lives at docs/USER_GUIDE.md in the repository, with the images under docs/screenshots/ (both excluded from the source submission zip).

Equipment required

Android device supported by ATAK-CIV 5.8. A network connection. The plugin holds no offline camera data; a camera picture is only meaningful when it is current.

Works with

Any Android device supported by ATAK. No additional or external hardware, no sensors, no peripherals.

Network and security

(This is important for ATO, networking, and other security concerns)

Outbound TCP 443 (HTTPS) only.

The plugin fetches a camera catalog over HTTPS, polls a small delta feed for camera bearings and online status while the panel is open, and fetches camera imagery and video directly from the publishing agency. Every request the plugin makes is HTTPS; the HTTP client refuses a non-HTTPS request, and any camera whose published stream or image URL is not HTTPS is rejected rather than offered.

Live video is served over HTTPS on TCP 10443 for the wildfire networks, because ATAK's player cannot read a multipart stream over HTTP/2 and that listener is HTTP/1.1 only. Agency-hosted streams are HTTPS on TCP 443.

No inbound ports. No listening sockets. No traffic to or from the TAK server; no CoT is generated or consumed.

The plugin is inert without a network connection. It stores no camera imagery and keeps nothing on the device except the operator's own settings and favorites list.

More on GitHub →