| (Long Distance) Ramblings |
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I like to ride my bicycle - for long distances. I have earned the California Triple Crown and finished the Furnace Creek 508. My goals include qualifying for RAAM and ...(read the blog to find out). "The bicycle has a soul. If you are able to love it as it deserves, it will give you emotions you will never forget." "Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride."
"The important decisions in my life I make while out riding my bike."
"Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever.” Lance Armstrong
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Sunday, January 07, 2007
Just look out the window!One day I was surfing and came upon map of personal weather stations near my home in Keizer. I thought this was cool, so I called Joanne over to take a look. I could see that see was interested, but I did not know how interested until I received a personal weather station as a Christmas present. Joanne gave me a Lacrosse Weather Pro Center (WS-2310 TWC). Fun! I now had a project! From the first, my intent was to connect the weather station to a computer and present near-time weather observations on my web site. And, I wanted to do this using Linux and open source software. Well, after several false starts, my weather page is ready to go live. Before I send you off there, here is some information concerning my setup. First of all, my Thermo-Hygro sensor, my rain sensor and wind sensor are located on the rear deck of the house. This is a temporary location and my result in some inaccurate readings. I have order and awaiting delivery of a mast so I can mount the sensors above the roof, a much better location than the current one. The three weather sensors use a 433 MHz radio signal to communicate with the weather station base station wirelessly. The base station is connected to a serial port of a computer running SuSE Linux. I have installed an open source set of utilities known as Open2300 on the computer and configured the computer to pull data every 2 minutes from the weather station and upload it to my web server. A script formats the data and presents the data in a readable format. You can see the results at www.onyourleft.net/ws. No, the project is not done. I have several things left to do... 1) Install the mast and mount the sensors once the mast arrives. 2) Start sending data to The Weather Underground. Down the road, I may consider archiving weather data in a MySQL database and creating reports. However, I will only go there if I can not use Weather Underground for this. Yes, if I am not riding the bike, this is what I do for fun.
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