|
I always liked monitoring the weather though it wasn't something I obsessed about much. I had been looking around for a while for a weather station that I could setup at home and hook into a computer to transmit data to the Internet. I decided upon the Lacrosse WS-2315 which I got from Amazon for, at the time, $179. I even had some credit with Amazon so it came to less. I had to wait for the snow to melt off the roof before I was going to climb up and put the wind sensor up, so I had the temp/humidity sensor running for a while. When I could get up on the roof I mounted a pole and the wind sensor. Ran the telephone wire down to where I wanted to keep all the other components, hooked it up to the temp sensor and then hooked up the rain sensor. It works wireless to the base station which connects via a RS-232 cable to a spare notebook I had which captures the data. It comes with a basic program that you can use to monitor the activity and even upload a graphic to a web site. The updates weren't as frequent as I liked, so I ran the supplied cable from the temp unit to the location I was going to keep the base station and connected notebook. After some work, I have a few pages of current weather info up at http://www.levinecentral.com/weather. The data from VWS also updates Weather Underground which can be accessed much like WeatherBug using Weather Exchange where you can point to a local station. For the best software, I looked around, and for what I wanted, it appears that Ambient's Virtual Weather Station (Internet Edition) (aka VWS) is the product I'll go with. I'm still running off the 30 day trial version I downloaded. It has a lot of features and creates graphics that get generated and uploaded to your web site. It's not cheap, with the software costing $99, but unless I run into issues with it or find an alternative software product that does the same thing (my own site as well as Weather Underground and works with my Lacrosse WS-2315) I'll go with Ambient's solution. It's been a lot of fun so far. The only issue I've noticed is my humidity has bottomed out 3 times and I've had to breathe on the sensor to get it working again. I might have Lacrosse send me a replacement sensor. Otherwise, it's been working very well. I've also gotten Weather for Dummies which I just started reading to learn a bit more about weather in general. It's been easy reading and I've already picked up a lot. Once I get through this, if I want to read some more, I have the Weather Forecasting Handbook saved to my Amazon Wish List. So far it's been a nice little hobby that hasn't cost me a fortune :-) |