Banana Bend River Life

February 6th, 2009

One of the things I’m kindof proud of is the Banana Bend Weather Station ( http://www.bananabend.net/~mtaylor/weather/index.html) . The project is coming along nicely and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I’ve been able to get the web server to read and record the data, and provide trending and archiving via a MySQL database.  In addition, I’m a member of Weather Underground, which has to be one of the best weather sites around if you are into following the weather.  After Ike, who isn’t?  The software uploads the data so Wunderground can display it.

My weather gear is a LaCrosse WS-2315 I picked up on Ebay for $70 and it records indoor and outdoor temps and humidities, rainfall rates and amounts, barometric pressure and wind direction and speed.  It calculates a number of other parameters, like dew points and heat index from this data.  All in all, a great unit for a great price and I have had a lot of fun with it.

The WS-2315 comes with some basic Windoze software that will archive the data and produce a basic Jpeg image that displays current data and that works pretty well, but my web server runs Fedora Linux, so that wasn’t really a viable option for me. I chose a great weather monitoring package called WView ( http://www.wviewweather.com ). This software is simply awesome. It provide database archiving,  automatic webpage image production, charting, and even sending your data to Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com ).  What is amazing, is its free for peronal use under the GNU licencing agreement. It’s worth its weight in gold and generates a truly professional looking weather site.

I’m having a great time with it, and I hope yall are enjoying it too! Suggestions?

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »