My son Max and I have finished installing our weather station on the roof and will hook it up to the interweb as soon as we are able.
We went for a pole mount mainly for the WAF (Wife Approval Factor) and because it also allows us somewhere to hook up the outdoor Meraki WiFi aerial. As discussed in a previous post, I’ve got a La Crosse WS2300 and, while all the bits were in the box and things were relatively simply to setup, I did need to do a bit of a garage mod on the rainfall gauge so it too could sit on the pole (WAF wouldn’t extend to wires going to multiple (but more ideally placed) locations). The wiring was simple and the hardest bit was hunting the shelves in the sporting section of The Warehouse for a compass so we could orientate the Anemometer.
Once installed, the next issue we had was getting the signal from the base unit to the PC which was running the Weather Display software. I’ve got the box itself sitting in my server cabinet in the home office, but the run length to the other end of the house where the most suitable indoor temperature could be taken is far in excess of the 10m that the serial connection can handle – and there I was thinking I could finally make use of the patch panel and the RJ45 outlet in the living room! As a result, the unit is unfortunately sitting on the bottom of the server cabinet in the office, which does get a bit warmer than the rest of the house – but there it will stay until such time as I can find a wireless serial to IP converter or similar which will allow a serial connection to the box holding the software from the other end of the house.
Anyway, that’s it for now – family duties call, next up getting the data on the web.
Edit 28/12/2007: Station now live via the groovy Vista Sidebar Gadget from CobbNZ. Simply add the gadget and type “Birkenhead†into the location field to find us.
Edit 04/01/2008: Weather station is fully on the interweb and viewable at http://inskeep.net/weather/ (yes, no www. The software is very particular about how it ties itself to a specific domain).