Sierra Thunder Weather Station Information
WX200 (Radio Shack)The data is provided by the Radio Shack WX200 also known as the WM918 by Oregon Scientific. The sensors provide wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity and rain. The serial data is split with a simple diode bridge to provide data to two computers. I plan to soon upgrade the WX200 so the sensors will be more dependable and RF resistant. For information regarding tips and tricks concerning the WM918/WX200 see ZL1VFO's site.. The rain gauge is mounted on a 4 foot post in a clearing near the house and the wind instrument cluster is on a 10 foot pole in the same area, due to the hilly terrain neither are in the optimum location. The temp/humidity is in the process of finding a better location also. 
Virtual Weather Station (Ambient SW)VWS is the primary processing software. The data is read and logged at appx. 5 second intervals, the software then uses the data to calculate the various images, tables and data pages. VWS uploads the data to my server every 30 minutes. It also creates the "ParmaCam" page on the fly and uploads it also. It creates the Live Local Weather image on the main page, and creates table and text version on the ParmaCam page. The software has excellent support and runs reliably. It is a very feature rich program that is fairly easy to configure, it does have a learning curve to get the best results. 
WebCam 32 (Surveyor Corp.)WebCam32 grabs images from either a PCI capture card (CAM1) or USB video capture device (CAM2) and uploads them to the server. CAM1 is currently pointing NNE looking down the road in front of the house, it gives a good indication of the local road conditions. CAM2 is pointing WNW to observe the sky conditions. It also maintains the last 20 images with very little effort. I have been running this software for over five years and it is very reliable. It will also automatically create time laps AVI's with selectable frame intervals. 
Weather Display (Brian Hamilton)I am currently in the evaluation stages of this software. I can see some advantages to this package. It seems to have some features that other software lacks. I will continue to evaluate and update this as time goes on. 
Ham WeatherHam Weather is an excellent package that runs on my server. It is a real time weather forecast tool that uses data from the National Weather Service. It can create many different custom forecasts for any location in the US. It will provide Short term, Long term, Radar, Radar loops Watches/Warnings and other custom displays. It creates the weather scroll on the fly that is featured on the "PortolaCam" page. I am planning on setting up the e-mail features in the future to again provide custom e-mail forecasts. Stay tuned for new improvements to appear soon. If you have CGI access on your server, this is a package to look at. You can not beat the price! It is a very configurable system! 
The ComputersThe computer farm includes 5 tower systems and 1 laptop. "Why so many systems?" you ask, Why NOT? All systems share a 3 Mbps Cable connection provided by Cable One. All systems are networked with a Linksys BEFW11S4 - 4 port router w/802.11b wireless. I have recently added a WRT54G Linksys router. Most of the wireless activity is routed through the 54G, the 11S4 is still used to serve DHCP and do the WAN routing along with experimenting with LONG RANGE WiFi for a remote weather station. (See computer3 below for information) Computer1 is a 1.8Ghz Athelon with 512Meg RAM running Windows XP Pro. It is my "main" system. I do all of the web page development and testing on it along with my everyday computing needs. Computer2 is a 900Mhz P3 with 512Meg RAM running Windows XP Pro. It is the system that runs WebCam32 and the Virtual Weather Station. It is also the time server for all of the systems. It has a vintage Video Highway Xtreme video capture card (old but reliable) hooked to an old RCA camcorder. Computer3 is a 500Mhz Celeron with 128Meg RAM running Win 98SE. It is currently a test system running the Virtual Weather Station software and WebCam32 capturing images with a a USB video capture adapter. I am testing it with a yagi type antenna feeding a Linksys access point. I am currently getting over a mile of rock solid connectivity. I hope to be able to do some remote weather monitoring soon... Computer4 is a 233Mhz P2 with 256Meg RAM that runs WinME. It is a system monitoring a local Ham radio APRS frequency. It is also running a APRS weather program uploading information to the network. Computer5 is a 833Mhz P3 with 512Meg RAM that runs WinXP Pro. It is my wife's system. The LapTop is my road warrior. It is a Fujitsu Lifebook, 500Mhz Celeron with 256Meg RAM. It is a really tough notebook. It has travelled many many thousands of miles, most of those miles it has been ON and running. It is normally connected to the GPS and running a mapping program when on the road. It used the Linksys WUSB11 for network connectivity. It used to run a Orinoco PCMCIA card for wireless, but the notebook decided to jump off of the seat and land on the card sticking out of the slot. That was not good, it broke the PCMCIA header off of the motherboard. 
Misc. StuffAfter recently moving from the Portola area back to the Boise ID. area I started a Weather Hub page. I hope to be able to provide a local hub for weather related sites, you can view the first iterations of the Weather Hub, the data is provided by local weather station owners in the specified format. If you would be interested in providing weather data with a link back to your weather pages please e-mail me. Only a limited number of select sites will be featured. They will have to be located in the Treasure Valley and weather oriented, preferably with a webcam. I am also involved with Amateur (HAM) radio, now that I am back in Idaho I am planning on hosting an Echo Link node (hopefully full time access). |
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