hello,
I am about to invest in a weather station and wondered whether anybody could give me some advice on suitable models/software combinations for sending live feeds to Pachube. I don't need any fancy graphing software, just something with a reasonable range of sensors that will produce the raw data in a suitable format. I am looking to spend around £100.
Thanks in advance.
Re: any advice on weather stations / software?
Hi Spinster,
If your budget can stretch a little more the weather stations from Oregon Scientific have a model that outputs RS-232 into your computer's serial port. The data from these stations are updated about once every few seconds into a string that you can parse using processing (for example). I have been meaning to write a parser for this exact task as a feed into Pachube. I have the sentence decoder from a project I did some years ago, if you go down that road happy to send.
Few other low-cost stations output serial data as far as I have searched for recently.
------------------------------------------------------
Chris Leung
Developer of eeml
http://www.eeml.org
Re: any advice on weather stations / software?
Here are a few options, with the low end units in the range of your budget.
http://www.ambientweather.com/weatherbug.html
Re: any advice on weather stations / software?
Hi Spinster,
If your budget can stretch a little more the weather stations from Oregon Scientific have a model that outputs RS-232 into your computer's serial port. The data from these stations are updated about once every few seconds into a string that you can parse using processing (for example). I have been meaning to write a parser for this exact task as a feed into Pachube. I have the sentence decoder from a project I did some years ago, if you go down that road happy to send.
Few other low-cost stations output serial data as far as I have searched for recently.
I have just been looking at this one ...
http://www.weather-station-products.co.uk/item--LaCrosse-weather-station...
which says it comes with a "Pc RS 232 serial port cable" ... does that mean it would output suitable data to parse and send using Processing, or are there other requirements I need to look at as well?
Re: any advice on weather stations / software?
Hi Spinster,
It has a serial data communications capability which is a minimum. According to the specs. there is a proprietary PC-based interface available that you will need to emulate to get the station to transmit data to your processing sketch (if you try that first). You can use a simple terminal program (like MS Hyperterminal) to see if the station transmits out-of-the-box, otherwise you may find you need to write the hand-shaking routine.
I one I mentioned is the oregon WMR-918 station, it transmits a "sentence" regularly without any handshaking using simple terminal communications settings 9600 baud, 1, N.
------------------------------------------------------
Chris Leung
Developer of eeml
http://www.eeml.org
Re: any advice on weather stations / software?
How about this one from Maplin: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=223254 on sale for £69.99 and has a USB port - anyone hacked it or figured out its serial comm?
Re: any advice on weather stations / software?
nick over at the homecamp google group (http://groups.google.co.uk/group/homecamp) posts a link to a linux & python hack so looks like this should be possible: http://www.jim-easterbrook.me.uk/weather/
Re: any advice on weather stations / software?
I can confirm that this is possible and relatively easy. I did it in python (which I can hardly use) using the eeml library. I tried to get the python things here running on an OSX machine by the issues refereed to here (http://code.google.com/p/pywws/wiki/Compatibility) were not solvable. But running on a linux box was then quite simple, following the Debian suggestions on the same page.
Code below is based upon the TestWeatherStation.py and the eeml example. it is extracted from a larger program where e.g. the timing is set up so as not to spam the pachube server. Note that I am also not so sure about the correct timing intervals for the weather station: perhaps I am polling too quickly.
Tim
import eeml
import httplib
import datetime
import getopt
import WeatherStation
import sys
# initialise the weather station
ws = WeatherStation.weather_station()
while 1:
# now weather details
raw_fixed = ws.get_raw_fixed_block()
if not raw_fixed:
print "No valid data block found"
lo_fix = ws.get_lo_fix_block()
ptr = lo_fix['current_pos']
#print ws.get_data(ptr)
weatherdata = []
format=ws.reading_format
for key in ['hum_in','temp_in','hum_out','temp_out','pressure','wind_ave','wind_gust','wind_dir','rain']:
dec = WeatherStation._decode(ws.get_raw_data(ptr), format[key])
weatherdata = weatherdata + [dec]
print "Weather Data: ",weatherdata
# changed the first argument to the URL given when I made a new feed,
# second is the API I was given when subscribing
wpac = eeml.Pachube('/api/1537.xml', PACHUBE_API)
wpac.update([eeml.Data(0, weatherdata[0]), eeml.Data(1, weatherdata[1]), eeml.Data(2, weatherdata[2]), eeml.Data(3, weatherdata[3]), eeml.Data(4, weatherdata[4]), eeml.Data(5, weatherdata[5]), eeml.Data(6, weatherdata[6]), eeml.Data(7, weatherdata[7]), eeml.Data(8, weatherdata[8])])
try:
wpac.put()
except Exception, e:
print "Sending data error Capture"
print e