Integrating Weather Reports into a Webserver? 61
meteorologist asks: "I work at a small college (300 students) in a small town (1500 people), and on our website we have a weather section. The problem is that it can only get weather information from a town 40 miles away. There is one local reporting station, but it reports exclusively to weatherbug, which slows down computers, and inevitably leads to spyware infections. How do I go about setting up a weather meter (temperature, humidity, wind velocity, and so forth) so that its results can be integrated into an already established website?"
roll your own? (Score:5, Informative)
good luck...
La Crosse Weather Station + Open2300 + LAMP (Score:5, Informative)
I use a weather station made by La Crosse [lacrossetechnology.com].
The station measures temperature, rain, humidity, wind speed and even calculates the dew point. It also functions as an atomic clock receiver.
The sensors are outside, and connect to a base station inside the house through a wired or wireless (433 MHz) connection. The base station connects to a PC over a serial connection. The sensors are battery powered. Mine have been running for 6 months off of NiMH batteries.
The stations come with software for Windows, but you can also use connect via Linux using the Open2300 [lavrsen.dk] project.
2300 includes most everything you need: The C programs read from the device via a serial port and write the information to a flat file or to an optional MySQL database.
Using a set of PHP scripts, you can host the data on any Apache webserver. As an alternative, you can upload the data to Weather Underground [wunderground.com], or even broadcast it over a HAM radio (Citizens Weather-- but I know nothing about this).
The weather stations also listens to the NIST Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado. I'm looking at ways of using my weather station to set the time for my NTP service.
It's all pretty straightforward, and requires very little technical knowledge if you use the vendor-supplied versions of MySQL, PHP (With GD) & Apache.
My station for Berkeley [wunderground.com] has been setup for a month, but I need to remount the temperature sensors to a location that doesn't collect as much heat. It's not really 85F in Berkeley right now-- it's 85F right outside the office door, and a cool 80F inside.
Wrong way (Score:5, Informative)
If you try to simply display data from a cheap weather sensor kit, you won't get forecasts or anything.
Easy Answer! (Score:5, Informative)
What you want is a Davis Instruments [davisnet.com] station. These stations hook up, via serial cable, to any PC. If you're running some form of *nix, I highly recommend the Device::WxM2 [cpan.org] Perl module. I've written various collection daemons that use WxM2 to pull weather data from the station and store it in RRD [rrdtool.org] format or in a PostgreSQL database [postgresql.org]. I even wrote an AGI script that allows people calling my Asterisk [asterisk.org] PBX to hear the latest weather data. I also wrote a handy widget [chrissnell.com] for Konfabulator [konfabulator.org] that lets you watch the weather on your Mac/PC desktop in real-time.
Shameless plug: if you decide that the Davis station is right for you, stop by my employer's website [weathertools.com], where we have a variety [weathertools.com] of Davis Instruments choices.
One word of advice: we sell cheaper stations than the Davis models but if you are planning on putting this up on a roof and leaving it for 5+ years, you really want to go with a quality peice of equipment, not a Radio Shack toy that will disintegrate after a year in the sun.
Questions? Ask and I'll be glad to answer.
Chris
OneWire Weather Station (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.aagelectronica.com/aag/index.html [aagelectronica.com]
Linux software:
http://oww.sourceforge.net/index.html [sourceforge.net]
I'll be honest. I bought the kit, got the basics running with the software, couldn't get the wind vane calibrated, and ran out of time (new home, new baby, etc.). However, it all seems to work just fine and lots of people that report into wunderground.org seem to use this kit. I just haven't gotten it fully going myself.
Just saw the the guy that maintains the unix/linux/risc os s/w has it running on a Linksys NSLU2. Cool.
Re:Wrong way (Score:5, Informative)
They have some useful weather info there, and I think it's contributed to by individuals as well.
Perhaps you have a neighbor that's reporting to it.
A few more... (Score:4, Informative)
Here's another neat one: Joe Jaworski's vproweather [joejaworski.com] uses a C-based program to pull the data from the Davis VantagePro stations, and some Bourne shell scripting to glue it all together. One neat thing about his approach: he is using SerialEthernet converters [troygroup.com] and a little program called remserial [lpccomp.bc.ca] to tie his stations to his computer. This costs more than my method of using the Davis station's wireless capability to transmit the data, but is capable of sending the data over much longer distances--even around the world, I suppose.
Finally, these guys [earlham.edu] are using C, PostgreSQL, and Perl for their Davis-based station.
Oregon Scientific + Ambient VWS + Hamweather (Score:1, Informative)
You don't have to spend big bucks, either. You can do quite a bit with just a few hundred dollars.
If you use Zope... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wrong way (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/index.
phpWeather (Score:2, Informative)
Ambient Weather Solution (Score:1, Informative)