[Klug-general] Linux weather station!

[Mike]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 04:58:05PM +0000, Benjamin Donnachie wrote:
> Just wondering whether anyone has any practical experience of running
> a Linux-based weather station?
> 
> Long story, but after years of neglect I've decided that it's time I
> made progress with my garden.. and being a geek I've decided that a
> weather station that sends me frost alerts etc is the only way to
> progress!  I've already got CAT5 laid to the end of the garden and a
> spare machine ear-marked for the job.  One day I may even tackle the
> weeds/jungle/nature reserve...
> 
> I quite like the WSI-603 1-wire Weather Station Kit[1] and will look
> into modifying wview[2] or OWW[3] to work with it.  Over time I'd
> quite like to add a range of home-brew sensors including rain[4],
> humidity, pressure and various stats on the state of the soil.
> However, as much as I like attempting to build electronic circuits, I
> seem to possess a massive static charge and can kill an IC from the
> other side of the room even wearing an earth strap.  Also toying with
> the idea of expanding my current X10 infrastructure to facilitate
> automatic irrigation[5], but I suspect a watering can will prove more
> effective!
> 
> Anyone tried this sort of set up or similar?  Any pitfalls?  Any
> advice on home-brew sensors and connecting them up?  Anyone used the
> 1-wire protocol under Linux?

I got LaCrosse WS-2350 weather station for Christmas.  If you're looking
for a DIY project this would be just the thing.  The amount of mods
required to turn this steaming pile of **** poorly engineered **** into
a working instrument will keep your soldering iron busy for millenia.

The device comes with an wind vain and anemometer and a rain sensor that
connect to a central controller via Cat 3.  This turned out to be rather
unwise as they also didn't stick any noise surpression in there, so the
Cat 3 acts like a giant antenna for anything that happens to be going
by.  Aparently 7MHz is very good for imitating the rain sensor.  Most
people rip the Cat 3 out and replace it with shielded Cat 5 and a couple
of ferrite rings.

The device has a 433MHz wireless link to the console.  It's the most
unreliable thing going and regularly drops out for hours at a time,
dispite being sat in the window with clear line of sight to the station
some 20m away.  Most people give up on this fairly quickly and just use
the wired option.  Apparently it also takes fewer samples over wireless.

The one saving grace is that it's fairly simple to talk to using Linux.
It comes with a USB cable, which is actually a serial cable with a
prolific PL2303 USB to serial adapter.  Tragically it uses some fairly
poorly engineered protocol to talk to it but there is an OSS tool called
Open2300 which does the trick.

I stuck it at the bottom of the garden but it's far too sheltered for
the anemometer.  Also within a couple of weeks the local scroats had
decided to use the frame it's mounted on as a goal post and smashed the
anemometer mounting bracket.  There's a lot of tall trees in the garden
and a three storey block of flats to contend with.  It also needs to be
close to the house so that I can cable it to make up for the
deficiencies in that wireless link.  I was thinking of a replica of the
Warsall Mast but I fear that may really *$%£ the neighbours off!  Th
lastest idea is to stick it on a TV ariel mount on the side of the
building.  While looking for said mounting, I came across this:

http://www.aerialsandtv.com/healthandsafetybollocks.html

Enjoy.

Mike.
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