Thread: Who switched off Spring ? Seems like Summer's here already .....

ElNino, high water temperature in the Pacific and climate change. Watch this space I expect let's hope the temps back track a bit or it will be a horror season for fire and crop yields

Different story up here, blowing a gale passing showers with sideways rain, top of 21°c today, currently 15°C outside at 8:30pm.

Was 33C in melbourne today. They say 35C tomorrow until a change sweeps through. The weeds out the back are loving the warm ground. They were only little weeds last week.

Temp has rocketed up to 15.6°C here at 7:45am.

If anyone is interested in knowing how to set up a private (on the Internet, it's anything but private) personal weather station on the Internet, let me know, and if the interest is there I'll write it up, and find somewhere on the forum to post it.

A mate in USA has his station on Weather UG. It's a great site, but the station he used there is not available here and they won't ship. What is a good locally available kit?

Originally Posted by Cliff Rogers

Temp has rocketed up to 15.6°C here at 7:45am.

I don't think it got that low here overnight, Apparently the forecast high for Wednesday is roughly the same as the actual low overnight Monday.

It still hasn't got to 19°C here yet, still blowing, passing showers, a few patches of sun.

Originally Posted by AlexS

A mate in USA has his station on Weather UG. It's a great site, but the station he used there is not available here and they won't ship. What is a good locally available kit?

Attachment 360998AlexS,

[Edit]: Sorry - for some reasons, photographs on this page are appearing in the wrong place or appearing only as "Attachments". Unfortunately that might make this page a bit harder to view.

Jaycar sell a wireless weather station, which connects to a computer via USB. See photo at right. It costs $169.00, but it's often reduced during their sales. I got mine in March 2015 for $110.

http://www.jaycar.com.au/Outdoors-%2...h-USB/p/XC0348
20151006_104845.jpg
The outdoor part is predominately made from UV stable plastic, and the parts are mounted to a supplied length of Aluminium tubing about 500mm long. There's a fair bit of assembly required, but the instructions are reasonable. The wiring is all supplied with RJ style plugs - similar to a network cable, or a modern telephone cable. I mounted my outdoor unit on the supplied Al pole, and then used hose clamps to secure the Al pole to the top of a 1 meter length of 1/2" Galv Pipe, which in turn is attached to the top of a star picket fence post. The outdoor unit is about 30 meters away from the house, and about the same distance away from the nearest trees, to minimise any errors in wind speed/direction readings caused by obstructions. The outdoor unit has a pair of AAA rechargeable batteries, and an in-built solar panel that keeps the outdoor unit's batteries charged.

The indoor part (the digital panel in the photo at right) runs off three AA batteries. The display panel is about 125 x 100mm, so it's a good size. The connection between the outdoor unit and the display panel is wireless. No cables needed. The wireless link is said to be good for up to 50 meters.

The indoor unit can be connected to a computer. There is some windows software that comes with the device that allows a computer to capture readings from the weather station and display those readings on various graphs, and I believe that the software can also create a basic web page with the data. However, I don't have any Windows computers at home, so I've never used the supplied software, so I have no idea regarding the true capabilities and usefulness of the software that comes with the device.

In my case, I wanted to broadcast the data from my weather station over the Internet, so it could be displayed on Weather Underground. To do that, Weather Underground requires that you are online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So, you need a computer running 24/7.

To achieve that goal, without running up a big power bill running a computer 24/7, I chose to use a very small computer called a Raspberry Pi. It is a available for around AUD$55.00 - the price varies a bit depending on the specific model and the chosen configuration. The RasPi is a very small single board computer, slightly bigger than a credit card, and about 15mm thick. As a computer to broadcast the weather station's data to Weather Underground, the RasPi's biggest attraction was it's cheap price, and it's low power consumption. Mine consumes 3.2 watts - which made it ideal for running full time, without creating a huge electricity bill. The amount of internet bandwidth that is consumed by uploading your weather data to Weather Underground once every 50 seconds, 24/7, is tiny, as each individual data upload is a string of text and numbers only 120 characters long.

From that point onwards - getting the computer to talk to the weather station, and then getting the computer to talk to Weather Underground, becomes a technical exercise that is rather too complex to document in a single post here.

In my case, because of my prior experience in the computer industry, my expertise lies with using Linux, so that's what I chose to put on the RasPi. There is then free and open source software that is available for download, that looks after talking to the weather station, and looks after talking to Weather Underground, Facebook, Twitter, and lots of other web sites of your choosing. There's also a sizeable online community around the world who willingly provide all the documentation, how to information, and technical assistance when needed. The free weather station software that I use on Linux is called pywws.

For those people who are more comfortable managing a Windows computer, I understand that similar software is available to do the same job on a Windows computer, but I have no personal experience using weather station software on Windows, so I can't offer much advice in that regards. However, when getting the above link for pywws, I noticed that they now say that as pywws is written "python" scripting language, the pywws software will run on any computer operation system that the Python Scripting Language will run on. Python is pretty universal, running on both Windows and Mac, so running Python under windows may be feasible - the pywws support group can probably provide more information if anyone wants it.

If your available funds allow you to spend more money on a weather station that I have, then there are plenty of options available in Australia. Davis, Oregon-Scientific, and LaCrosse are brands that come to mind, and all of those manufacturers sell weather stations that will connect to a computer, and also sell software that allows uploading to Weather Underground and other online weather sites. One retailer of those brands in Australia is www.instrumentchoise.com.au, but a search on Google will reveal plenty of retailers, but not all will stock the internet capable weather stations. Many of the higher end weather stations from companies like Davis, have fully configured Weather Underground Upload software included, so these higher end weather stations may be a better solution for someone who just wants to plug it in and turn it on, rather than building a DIY solution as I have done. (I did build a wooden case of the RasPi, so some woodwork was involved .

I hope that info is useful.

Regards,

RoyG

Roy, thanks for that comprehensive explanation. I'm interested in putting in a station. Unfortunately, I can't meet the exposure standards for installation, and I suspect that's the case with most urban installations - it's hard enough in the country. Nevertheless, it will be of interest to me.

Originally Posted by AlexS

Roy, thanks for that comprehensive explanation. I'm interested in putting in a station. Unfortunately, I can't meet the exposure standards for installation, and I suspect that's the case with most urban installations - it's hard enough in the country. Nevertheless, it will be of interest to me.

Alex,

A lot of people manage to get a good location for a weather station is suburban developments by mounting the weather station on the top of their outdoor TV antenna. I know one bloke that has his weather station mounted on the top of the pole that his PayTV dish is mounted on. There's often a way.

RoyG

I was referring to the international standard exposure and positioning requirements for official weather stations, eg rain gauge catch 300mm above ground, completely exposed above 30 degrees from horizontal etc. However, as it wouldn't be an official station, and the instruments aren't standard (eg 200mm rain gauge catch) it's not important (to me, anyway). The measurements would simply be an indication.

Roy
Whilst we ignore the the ramifications of pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere
The planet is going to get hotter and hotter
What a wonderful legacy to leave for the next generation(s)...MM

Roy, you're lucky to only get to 36, last Monday on the long weekend my weather station showed we got to 44.7 & the thermometer on the back wall under my awning showed 41. I really love SW Sydney, NOT

It hasn't been over 21°C here for about 10 days now, sun is out today so there is a chance we could go higher.