The weather at home...

The setup

2009-12-10

I've used an Oregon Scientific WMR968 for years, but it's long in the tooth and some of the outside sensors have degraded, cracked, yellowed or simply died. I also never really got around to using the data for anything. Its still there, the RS232 output hooked up to a serial console server I have in the basement but it doesn't report much weather. Mostly just the temperature in one of the wine fridges.

We recently built a greenhouse at the bottom of the yard, between the veggie garden and the shed. As usual I'm trying to be clever and it occured to me that in order to know how cold it gets overnight, and thus how much energy would be required to avoid plants freezing, one would need instrumentation. And since my old weather station has faded perhaps this was an opportunity to upgrade a little.

And like so many things I do, I went a bit overboard. Last week I purchased a Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus (though I did restrain myself and did not get the aspirated version, or the rain bucket heater). I also got the WeatherLinkIP (so it can talk over the LAN), Meteohub (installed on my VM server) and Weather Display Live.

The exterior sensors are mounted above the apex of the greenhouse roof and the console is inside. The console is powered by the small solar panels behind the greenhouse (on batteries we'd only get a few days with the ethernet module in it!) The Cat5 cable for the ethernet I ran years ago when I did the lawn and garden irrigation - I used the vibratory plough to bury a conduit whilst I was renting the machine.

Live weather

Weather Link Live is a Flash app that polls for data every few seconds. I use Meteohub to generate the data and that is then sync'ed once per minute to a webserver.

Meteohub

Meteohub is a self-contained Linux-based app that can collect data from a variety of weather stations and then process, archive and distribute it. Currently I have the Weather Display Live data being produced, a handful of graphs and I forward data to Weather Underground and CWOP (and thus onto NOAA and other agencies). I do also send data directly from the WeatherLinkIP module to Davis' own weather site.

Graphs