This is kind of a linux question.

I have no window at work. I was thinking of taking a small LCD and hooking it to a Raspberry Pi (Or some other tiny board PC) and then linking that to my cell phone to stream a webcam from Grand Turk, or wherever I want to see that day. My phone is 4G and I have 30gigs of data a month. My question is, how much bandwidth does VIEWING a webcam take? I think most of them update every 30 seconds or so.

On a related note, does anyone have experience with LCD4Linux? Is it possible to use that to display a webfeed?

Thank you

It depends on you webcam. 512kbps and up.

512k a second? That sounds kind of high. Isn't it only downloading a new image when the site refreshes?

It's 512 kilobits per second. Or 64 KB/sec.

Oh, thats better but still kind of high. Thats for a new image every 30 seconds?

Or you can just buy one that's already web-enabled, and use your company network to view it:
http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-DSM-210...sin=B0014B8GR8

That's just one of many you can find. While it might be a fun project, it'll take some time to get things going. The bandwidth will depend on the site you're viewing. If they're shoving a 320x200 picture every 30 seconds, that's far different than 800x600 at 10 frames a second. Your mileage may vary, depending on what you view.
That's more for driving the smaller monochrome LCD displays. Useful for hardware stats, new email notifications, etc., but not really for pictures.

Again, you need to READ and UNDERSTAND the original question. The OP clearly posted that they were going to be displaying someone ELSES webcam...not their own. And where did you guess at the 512kbps figure? There is NO WAY to even guess at that, since it would totally depend on how many frames per second, along with height, width, and color depth. Please don't post misleading information.

Thank you! Lets go with 800x600 at 10 second intervals. I am guessing about a meg a minute?

I think you can use LCD4Linux to display images and information on a higher quality display. If not, what would you suggest?

That depends on color depth. 800x600x16 bit takes up less than 800x600x32 bit. And if you're using someone elses webcam, you're at their mercy. It sounds like you want to display whatever webcams from around the world you can find, so your mileage may vary. Personally, if I was using my 4g data, I'd limit it to once a minute or so, because a 100KB image once per minute, 8 hours a day, 20 work-days in a month, will get you to the 1 GB range by itself.
From what I know of LCD4Linux, you MIGHT be able to, but it's not a pleasant task...it's not really designed for pictures. And the small LCD's that it drives are pricey.

Honestly, I'd suggest grabbing a cheap 20" monitor, putting it on a dual-head video card in your Linux box, and just use any piece of generic software (heck, even a BROWSER, running full-screen w/no task bars), to display webcam images. Sidestep ALL the difficulties w/4G data, etc.

If going down that route you could go with RaspberryPi running Screenly - http://www.screenlyapp.com/ and a monitor or TV with HDMI input.

A gig a month is fine with me, I have 30 and never come close to using it all. I can't use the work network for a number of reasons so an LCD of some type tied to a lightweight, low power computer (Raspberry Pi or the like) will have to do. I was thinking of getting an LCD controller off of ebay to convert my 15inch Laptop LCD for this purpose.

Screenly looks good but I don't think I could add any other data, just images.

What about a website with the information I want (web feed, news, etc) that a script automatically loads when the system starts up? I have a web design background so the layout would not be hard.

Heck, why not just buy a used, low-power laptop for $50 somewhere and just have it use your wifi from your phone as a hot-spot? Certainly be the cheapest route.
You can easily do that. Linux has what's known as "kiosk mode"...so that it comes up with a program and NOTHING ELSE. Having your web browser comes up to a page of your own design, which picks a website from a list you have wouldn't be hard at all.

Screenly works just fine with full URLs. We use it here to drive a TV on a wall and have it looping through URLs for internal monitoring, the BBC news page, and a few static images that were uploaded to the Pi.

Fantastic, I will see what I can work up using a web page and screenly. Thank you.