small online weather station

edsard boelen, 12 okt 2012

Since the arduino temp sensor died after 1 and a half year of operation, I thought maybe look around for a weather station to connect to the computer. I found an inexpensive one with a usb interface: based on the Fine Offset WH1080

view current graphs here

mounting the weather station

the package comes with a 20mm bar on which the various sensors can be mounted. I think I will place it on top of the dormer. A small wooden frame will hold everything in place.

connecting to the computer

The data is sent wireless to a lcd display. The display has a usb connector which I have connected to a small server running linux. The interface is not difficult. various projects are already there. I used the fowsr It is a small program that writes the data to a xml file. I set the cron daemon to do that every 30 minutes.
Every hour the new lines will be sent to the webserver, I made a small xml parser to view the table data.

generating graphs

For the graph I still use phplot. But temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed/direction cannot be plotted in one graph, so multiple graphs will have to be generated.
Phplot has the option to write the output to a file instead of realtime rendering. I will use another cron job which will call a PHP script that generates the different graphs.

the graphs

this week, updated hourly