The Weather Project

***** NOTE 7/24/2008

My original weather project included the POS WMR100. That unit died like everyone else's did so I bought the delightful WMR968. If you feel so inclined you can see my original entry here. Why

Why do I do any of this crap? Anyone that knows me knows that I am fascinated by making geeky cool stuff work. I don't remember where it started but I've always wanted to buy a wireless weather station. I think this seemed a little more possible once I made this site - hosting it at my house is a huge advantage. Rather than uploading data to a site I could just send it to my server.

What

As you may suspect, I knew nothing about weather stations so I had to do some research before buying one. It didn't take long for me to realize that the "decent" weather stations cost several hundred or even thousands of dollars. After trying out the Oregon Scientific WMR100 (cringing) I decided to give the Oregon Scentific WMR968 a try.

The package is fairly straight-forward to use. I put the weather wind and baromet meter (on the right side of the graphic) out on the pool deck and I put the rain gauge (the middle unit in the picture) on the deck of the house as its range isn't nearly as good as the other unit. The wind gauge is supposed to have a range of 300' so I doubted that it would reach into the basement where the server is. The base unit (left unit in the picture) connects to a server via a usb cable.

Once I connected to the base, the Ambient Weather software package allowed me to poll the base station every x minutes and write to a local database. It also has options for creating web pages - I've used this for serving this web page on my server. Believe it or not, I can also see this page on my tivo as it is just one big graphic file. I also wrote a little script to read the database and copy the most recent value into my homepage. You can see this just underneath the title - I have it poll the database every 2 minutes to increase page loading times.

Here is a pic of my weather gauge mounted above my pool. I have no idea why there was a long tube sticking up from the deck (this was the previous owner's doing) but it seemed like a perfect place to install the gauge.

I also went so far as to install a monitor in my bedroom and one in my kegerator. You can see the live readings for all of my units at the top of this page.