Weather Station Online!

I've finally gotten my home weather station online!

I'm using a Oregon Scientific WMR918 system with anemometer (wind speed), wind direction, temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure sensors. Click Here to access the current and recent readings, or the Weather page of an integrated page (also available in the navigation bar below the blog title)and "read more" to find out how it works.

The WMR 918 has a serial port that sends-out all the data that it collects(and lightly processes). I have this signal going into my home server, which is running the open source wview website. Because my weather setup is a bit different than what is typical, I had to make some changes to the source code. (probably the best part about open source!) I guess most weather stations come with a "mushroom" sensor which is a thermo hygrometer (temperature and humidity) that is encased in a radiation shield (so direct sunlight doesn't affect the readings). I don't have one of those. My outdoor temperature sensor is reported differently on the serial output. The wview software was expecting a certain kind of data packet, and having never gotten it, it never initialized. Once I changed the source code so that it ignored the difference I was all set. B.T.W: The wmr918 init issues thread about this process is on the Wview google groups page.

I've gotten the data up in several personal weather aggregation services. I've decided that I don't really like weather underground (way too cluttered), butI'm up on PWS (Personal WeatherStations), and APRS (Automatic Position ReportingSystem). APRS is a weird amateur radio thing. Basically, what it was designed to be is a way for small bits of digital data to be passed around so that, especially during search-and-rescue, operators can know where one another are. Over the years it has been expanded to include many interesting uses. One of which is the sharing of personal weather station observations.Eventually, NOAA even started using the data in their models. One of the many things I want to do, one of these days, is install a APRS node in my car.I know it is geeky to the max, but that is what I am.

Anyway, back to the point, everything works! I hope you enjoy the fascinating(not really) weather trends from Philomath Oregon! Oh, and hopefully soon I'll have a handy widget that displays a digest of the current conditions in this sidebar. But for now, feel free to check the current conditions page.