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(Should have hit preview. :( )

I set up my dad's weather station (a Davis Vantage Pro2. Highly recommend it, as does Make Magazine)) is part of cwop.

If you get a good weather station, the system comes with sunshades for thermometer, and obviously you won't put it under a tree if you want the rain gauge to work. The only real guidelines they give you about placement is where to setup your anemometer if you have one. You want to put it 7 meters above ground level, and ideally 20 meters from any obstructions. If there are obstructions (e.g. trees and houses), you want to put it at least 2 meters above them. Of course these siting preferences are some times impractical. In these cases, you can still upload your anemometer data, but it's flagged as suspect. Basically ground level wind readings are worthless, so the NWS doesn't really care.

Each station is part of a sensor network, and like many sensor nets, some nodes are more precise, more accurate, and more timely than others. By combining the data from all the nodes in the net, outliers can be found and corrected. So you see, it's okay that not every node is perfect, just as long as most of the nodes are pretty good, you can still get good data.

I set up my dad's weather station (a . Highly recommend it, as does Make Magazine)) is part of cwop.

If you get a good weather station, the system comes with sunshades for thermometer, and obviously you won't put it under a tree if you want the rain gauge to work. The only real guidelines they give you about placement is where to setup your anemometer if you have one. You want to put it 7 meters above ground level, and ideally 20 meters from any obstructions. If there are obstructions (e.g. trees and houses), you want to put it at least 2 meters above them. Of course these siting preferences are some times impractical. In these cases, you can still upload your anemometer data, but it's flagged as suspect. Basically ground level wind readings are worthless, so the NWS doesn't really care.

Countering systematic errors actually isn't that much more difficult. You have to realize that no station is in isolation. They're part of a network. Like all sensor networks, some sensors are going to be more accurate and more precise than others. All of this data is put together and outliers can be detected and corrected.

There already is such a product on the market called the CarChip. I am a partner in an exotic car rental company and we use them to scan for potential abusive driving of cars if cars are returned with mechanical damage.

You can set the CarChip to monitor RPM, acceleration, speed, etc. They record data at 1 second intervals, store 300 hours of drive-time data, they are absolutely tiny and thus can be surreptitiously placed in cars, they plug into the industry standard OBDII port which all model year 1996 or newer cars have, and they report incidences of being disconnected so you know if somebody has tampered with them.

You just disconnect them and plug them into a USB port to download all the data to the included software.

The fully featured models cost about 300 bucks.

Not perfect, but it's a pretty damned good solution if you want to monitor your teenager's driving. I would recommend disclosing it to them and just telling them that if they disconnect it you will consider it just as bad as if you catch them doing 120 on the highway, and that you will see any disconnect events in the log.

Wow, I've been waiting for this topic to show up for, what, six years now? :)

What you want is a Davis Instruments 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 Perl module. I've written various collection daemons that use WxM2 to pull weather data from the station and store it in RRD format or in a PostgreSQL database. I even wrote an AGI script that allows people calling my Asterisk PBX to hear the latest weather data. I also wrote a handy widget for Konfabulator 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, where we have a variety 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

I bet that the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) would propose something like this considering it is composed of driver's license officials and law enforcement executives and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA). NHTSA was particularly upset when the national speed limit of 65/55 mph was repealed almost 10 years ago.

An interesting item is I went to the Dayton Hamfest last year, there was one vendor selling a Car Chip that recorded details on your driving. I talked with the salesman and he even mentioned one company (he would not name) mandated this in private vehicles of their employees. If you didn't like it, you don't work for the company.

With the coming Driver License Agreement as sponsored by the AAMVA and the mandate for states to join it if the Real ID Act of 2005 passes combined with this technology, it would be very difficult to retain your driver's license or maintain reasonable insurance premiums especially if you travel alot by car like I do. Even a "law abiding" driver will get nailed here and there !

I will be doing a lot of traveling this Summer such as traveling from Colorado to California and to Indiana. In Indiana, the speed limits is pretty well 55 mph except for rural interstates. The 4 lane divided highways are 55 mph and I usually do 70 to 75 mph. Currently, Colorado takes no adverse action such as points for minor out of state offenses. Here in America, since our public transportation is non-existent, the motor vehicle is the only way to get around unlike Japan or Europe. Unfortunately, it is not practical since places of employment is spread around unlike many years ago where your job was located downtown in a given district.

Davis Instruments manufactures an OBD-II monitoring device called CarChip E/X that happens to capture 300 hours of acceleration, braking, engine performance, and impact sensor logs- it's only about $150 at most chain Auto Parts stores.

If you are at all interested in weather, think about putting in a wireless sensor package outside the house. I would look into the Davis Vantage Pro2. The university that I work at has the original Pro and I am thinking about getting one myself. It works like a charm: current weather, trends, 48hr forecasts, and graphs all on the base station. Plus, there is great software available for free on Linux called meteo that will populate a MySQL table with live data. Good stuff to then display using PHP and a web server.

If a commercial driver is on the road, he or she is required to be logging his or her time for driver fatigue reasons. A GPS that simply started a clock at the departure from a scheduled point, and stopped it on arrival at a destination (with subtractions if the GPS stops moving for 15 or more minutes) would let drivers squeeze every possible minute of their allowed drive time (it wouldn't count against them if they were unloading, for example) but would still maintain the safety requirements the employers are required to enforce.

Yeah, I don't really want to see them using them as "speeding tickets" (because I like being behind trucks that are flying down the freeway :-) but I doubt it will be much longer before there's a Federal requirement to include such a device in any commercial vehicle. If a fuel truck crashed into an elementary school because of driver fatigue, Congress would pass such a law faster than a troll going for a first post on Slashdot.

By the way, you can buy these devices from Davis Instruments today, if you're interested. They're trying to sell them to parents of teenage drivers.

There are already devices out there that don't require a third party to work. CarChip sells a device that plugs into the OBDI port on any late model car and will record 75 hours (the cheapest version does) of data including speed, RPM, etc. Unless the teen looks under the dash and knows what to look for, no one is the wiser.

Um, no. If their costs are lowered, their profits increase. Discounts are being given now because no one will allow themselves to be watched without compensation.

Cost savngs wll not be passed down to the consumer unless something like market forces make the insurance companies lower their rates.

Progressive could use the cost savings to lower premiums for certain participants in the program, but that would cause an exodus of "Sunday drivers" from other insurance companies to Progressive.

In order to compete effectively, other insurance companies would have to implement similar programs.

Once the majority of drivers are on the program, the 10-15% "discount" for good drivers would become the normal rate where other drivers, drivers of pre-1998 vehicles, or privacy advocates pay a 10-15% premium, are placed on assigned risk, or are denied insurance altogether.

Anyhow, this is a link to who I suspect is the manufacturer of the device: http://www.davisnet.com/drive/products/carchip_pro ducts.asp. I use one for personal use, and it does everything the insurance company would cream themselves over.

Back in May, I went to the Dayton OH Hamfest. The have many vendors there besides ham radio related. I stopped at one booth which was a company called Davis Instruments which sells a product called the "Car Chip". I was in an extended discussion with the proprieter.

The salesman mentioned that a lot of companies are requiring the device in company vehicles (I can understand since it is their property) and he even mentioned one company requires it in employee's personal vehicles as well. This is where the extended discussion came about. I asked him who the company was and he mentioned that the name cannot be divulged. The discussion went into privacy concerns such as it is none of your employer's business how you drive outside versus the emplyer's concern about you being an asset to the company.

I looked at the article and it was mentioned there was a bonus for not exceeding 75 mph. I am against the device myself. It is pretty bad that insurance companies can raise your rates without paying a claim such as getting a speeding ticket. I travel between Colorado and Indiana several times a year and when I drive, I end up driving through Kansas at 80 or 85 mph (70 mph SL) and usually drive about 80 mph in IL and IN (65 mph SL). Colorado does not recognize out of state minor violations (not yet!) which includes speeding. State to state reciprocity is another matter and is being pushed hard by the AAMVA with a legal instrument called the Driver's License Compact which is supposed to be replace by the Driver's License Agreement which requires all violations even down to parking tickets be on your driving record and also opens the door to reciprocity to foreign countries starting with Canada and Mexico.

The device is similar to the Davis Carchip if not this particular device. It hooks up to the OBDII port and reads the car's vitals from there.

Remember, it's a device drivers can simply plug in to the car. OBDII is a serial protocol that would be a bit harder to hack than the speedometer pulse wire.

Some things the CarChip does that this device will likely do:

1. Record times the device was disconnected
2. Record times data was downloaded/memory cleared
3. Keep a record of the speeds via timed snapshots
4. Keep a record of the date/time car was used (and how long).

It can keep track of vehicle usage (in my case) for the last three months with logging data points every 5 seconds.

No records of destinations or GPS tracking on these base models.

Disclaimer: I don't work for the company, but I have a Carchip E/X installed as insurance against unfair tickets and warranty "abuse" claims by the manufacturer.

I have an aftermarket black box in my car. It's the Carchip EX, and it stores several weeks worth of driving info in 5 second (or longer) intervals. It also has a 30-second buffer that records heavy braking or acceleration as well as 5 parameters (speed, RPM, temp, etc).

The best part is no one knows about this device but me.

Glass cleaner? What are you talking about? A Windex is a brand of wind direction indicator for sailboats.

How about an 802.11 weather station?

I'm just looking for something that sits outside my house, collects weather data and other such simple stuff, and relays that data back to a server to build a web page with or whatever.

I run a Davis VantagePro Weather station. It relays data from a sensor cluster up on my roof to a console in my computer room via 900MHz radio. Then Davis' WeatherLink software submists it to weatherunderground and to my own website.

How about an 802.11 weather station?

I'm just looking for something that sits outside my house, collects weather data and other such simple stuff, and relays that data back to a server to build a web page with or whatever.

I run a Davis VantagePro Weather station. It relays data from a sensor cluster up on my roof to a console in my computer room via 900MHz radio. Then Davis' WeatherLink software submists it to weatherunderground and to my own website.

called CarChip and DriveRight from here. Logs everything for hours. It's a geek's dream, teenager's nightmare. For the latter, I don't think you can hack around it since the odometer would have to correlate with it and hacking the odometer is bad mojo. Sucks to be a teenager now. Not only do they know where you are with location tracking GPS phones but how fast you got there.

Eight years later, it's done ok... the biggest problem is the wind sensor gets hit by lightning and it frys the station. The last time this happened, two years ago, I put off repairing it ($75) until I remount and properly ground the anemoneter (wind sensor). This will be one of my summer projects.

The humidity sensor dies every now and then, but Davis almost always replaces it for free. The biggest problem with that is where I mounted it; too high for regular access - I have to borrow a ladder.

I've pulled Cat5e to the attic and I'm about ready to deploy a "weather cam" pointed northeast out of an attic window so I can display realtime images. As the weather station comes back online, there are a number of windoze products out there that will log and create HTML pages with the data coming out of the WMII.

The WMII has been a fun little toy...

An underlying theme is the mounting of the sensors. Every location will be different, but can be a pain. The newer wireless sensors are very appealing, since you could mount them away from a house and not face some of the height/access problems you encounter on a roof top.

If I were to start over, I'd look at the now much richer market place like this:

• Available/tools/programs for logging, saving and making web pages for a station;
• Wireless support;
• Varity of sensors for the station;
• Warrenties given even the sensors get beat up and have to repaired/replaced;
• I'd favor products that have open, published data standards; Davis doesn't that I know of. Apparently third party products have reversed engineered the data stream.

You expect weather forecasts to be right?

Eight years later, it's done ok... the biggest problem is the wind sensor gets hit by lightning and it frys the station. The last time this happened, two years ago, I put off repairing it ($75) until I remount and properly ground the anemoneter (wind sensor). This will be one of my summer projects.

The humidity sensor dies every now and then, but Davis almost always replaces it for free. The biggest problem with that is where I mounted it; too high for regular access - I have to borrow a ladder.

I've pulled Cat5e to the attic and I'm about ready to deploy a "weather cam" pointed northeast out of an attic window so I can display realtime images. As the weather station comes back online, there are a number of windoze products out there that will log and create HTML pages with the data coming out of the WMII.

The WMII has been a fun little toy...

An underlying theme is the mounting of the sensors. Every location will be different, but can be a pain. The newer wireless sensors are very appealing, since you could mount them away from a house and not face some of the height/access problems you encounter on a roof top.

If I were to start over, I'd look at the now much richer market place like this:

• Available/tools/programs for logging, saving and making web pages for a station;
• Wireless support;
• Varity of sensors for the station;
• Warrenties given even the sensors get beat up and have to repaired/replaced;
• I'd favor products that have open, published data standards; Davis doesn't that I know of. Apparently third party products have reversed engineered the data stream.

You expect weather forecasts to be right?