Every morning when I get up I open the curtains and check on the weather. Is it warmer, drier, windier than yesterday? I also like technical toys so what could be better than a weather station that could record temperature, humidity, rain, wind speed and direction, store this data and, even better, communicate with my PC!
I have an Oregon
Scientific Weather Station which has four units that communicate with its
controller through wireless connections. They have small solar panels to provide
their power with battery back-up.
The windmeter (speed and direction) is mounted on our television mast, the thermo-hygrometer is sheltered from direct sunlight and mounted on a north facing wall whilst the rain gauge, which collects and measures the rain, sits on the garden shed roof. The indoor temperature and barometric pressure gauge has a much easier life sitting in the house. The main unit which communicates with these devices, listens to the national radio time transmission for accurate timing, records the data and also communicates the data to a PC running a piece of software aptly named Weather Display.
Weather Display is the software which logs the data and prepares and
transmits the information to my website for viewing by anyone
on the internet. Data is logged from the weather station controller to the PC
every minute. Weather Display also includes an FTP for transmitting web pages
to the web server every hour.
So now I have a weather page live on the web showing current Dorridge weather, a forecast icon, and history with analysis for past months.
I have included a 'live' webcam picture on my weather page which is also updated twice in each hour.
My Weather pages contain daily records of weather in Dorridge, UK (just south of Birmingham) from June 2002. See 'Previous Months' Archives'
To view Dorridge Weather page LIVE
click the sun ->