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Integrating Weather Reports into a Webserver?
meteorologist asks: "I work at a small college (300 students) in a small town (1500 people), and on our website we have a weather section. The problem is that it can only get weather information from a town 40 miles away. There is one local reporting station, but it reports exclusively to weatherbug, which slows down computers, and inevitably leads to spyware infections. How do I go about setting up a weather meter (temperature, humidity, wind velocity, and so forth) so that its results can be integrated into an already established website?"
http://wx200.planetfall.com/
good luck...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Fire up google and search for "home weather meter computer kit".
Wow amazing! It's like a knowledge index for websites that returns results for stuff you want to know about!
How funny, I'm working on this today.
I use a weather station made by La Crosse.
The station measures temperature, rain, humidity, wind speed and even calculates the dew point. It also functions as an atomic clock receiver.
The sensors are outside, and connect to a base station inside the house through a wired or wireless (433 MHz) connection. The base station connects to a PC over a serial connection. The sensors are battery powered. Mine have been running for 6 months off of NiMH batteries.
The stations come with software for Windows, but you can also use connect via Linux using the Open2300 project.
2300 includes most everything you need: The C programs read from the device via a serial port and write the information to a flat file or to an optional MySQL database.
Using a set of PHP scripts, you can host the data on any Apache webserver. As an alternative, you can upload the data to Weather Underground, or even broadcast it over a HAM radio (Citizens Weather-- but I know nothing about this).
The weather stations also listens to the NIST Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado. I'm looking at ways of using my weather station to set the time for my NTP service.
It's all pretty straightforward, and requires very little technical knowledge if you use the vendor-supplied versions of MySQL, PHP (With GD) & Apache.
My station for Berkeley has been setup for a month, but I need to remount the temperature sensors to a location that doesn't collect as much heat. It's not really 85F in Berkeley right now-- it's 85F right outside the office door, and a cool 80F inside.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
See if NOAA has forecasts for your area. Then hunt down PHP code, or develop your own, to process METARs for current conditions and TAFs for weather forecasts. This stuff can be pulled straight from NOAA. I know there's a PHP Services_Weather class out there.
If you try to simply display data from a cheap weather sensor kit, you won't get forecasts or anything.
Wireless Weather Rock -- Tie a rock to a rope and hang the rope from a
piece of wood stuck in the ground.
If rock is wet: It is raining
If rock is white: It is snowing
If you can only see top half of rock: It is really snowing
If white things are bouncing off side of rock: It is hailing
If you can see shadow of rock: It is sunny
No shadow: It is overcast
If you cannot see rock: It is night time
If rock is slowly swinging back and forth: It is windy
If rock is pulling rope horizontal: It is a hurricane
If rock, rope, and stick are gone: There was a tornado
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
Some ham radio guys have their weather stations send the current WX conditions to the internet. Try going here and entering in your city and state into their search. From there look for stations with a blue circle with WX in the middle. Those stations send out weather data. In my case the station CW2113. Click on the date to get the raw packet. From there you can decode the data.
7 49.28W_356/007g...t056P057h87b10047.DsVP
CW2113>APRS,TCPXX*,qAX,CW2113:@290007z4138.23N/08
Ignore everything before the @
29 is the Day
0007z is the zulu time
4138.23N/08749.28W are the lattitude and longitude of the station
356/007g wind is from 356* at 7MPH
t056 tempature is 56*F
P057 0.57" of precip have fallen
h87 is 87% humidity
Alternatively you can buy a scanner and a TNC and listen to the packets yourself on 145.390MHz.
Some other interesting sites are jfindu and googleAPRS
Weather station and accessories based on the Dallas 1-Wire and iButton components:
http://www.aagelectronica.com/aag/index.html
Linux software:
http://oww.sourceforge.net/index.html
I'll be honest. I bought the kit, got the basics running with the software, couldn't get the wind vane calibrated, and ran out of time (new home, new baby, etc.). However, it all seems to work just fine and lots of people that report into wunderground.org seem to use this kit. I just haven't gotten it fully going myself.
Just saw the the guy that maintains the unix/linux/risc os s/w has it running on a Linksys NSLU2. Cool.
Digging through my bookmarks, I found a few more. There is Meteo, which does data collection with a C program, storage using MySQL and delivery via PHP (and, apparently, RRDtool).
Here's another neat one: Joe Jaworski's vproweather uses a C-based program to pull the data from the Davis VantagePro stations, and some Bourne shell scripting to glue it all together. One neat thing about his approach: he is using SerialEthernet converters and a little program called remserial to tie his stations to his computer. This costs more than my method of using the Davis station's wireless capability to transmit the data, but is capable of sending the data over much longer distances--even around the world, I suppose.
Finally, these guys are using C, PostgreSQL, and Perl for their Davis-based station.
Insightful? Come on mods, this is in no way what he was asking for. Flamebait anyone?
I've been running the above combo for my weatherstation a few years now. Works real well.
You don't have to spend big bucks, either. You can do quite a bit with just a few hundred dollars.
Then download and install my ZWeatherApplet Zope Product.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
Not that I know about Weatherbug, but It seems to me that with a little bit of perl, WWW::Mechanize and WWW::Mechanize::Shell, maybe a bit of greping through some binary data (if Weatherbug reports through an ActiveX thingy) would enable you to get your weather data without using IE. Should only take a couple of hours, unless Weatherbug is really broken.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I am a programmer for WeatherBug. You can use a recently developed tool from us called WeatherBug Stickers. http://stickers.weatherbug.com/. It alows you to integrate our weather station data directly to your web site very easily. You can also use our API to integrate our data directly to your application http://api.weatherbug.com/ We are owners of largest weather station network in U.S. and I would say the world. We own 8,000 Weather Stations and 1500 Weather Cameras. We provide data to US homeland security, energy, transportation and much more. Weatherbug is not Spyware, or in any way harm your computer. With such assets we will be nuts to do such a thing. Ben
My guess is that you can use something like Myth Wewather from the MythTv Suite.
Using the Freedom of Speech while I still have it.
How is that Flamebait? It's exactly what he should do. This place amazes me sometimes. The last sentence was biting but it's true. Jebus. Somedays the points are for Mods without a sense of humor or logic. Flamebait me, I don't care.
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
I bought a couple of temperature-sensors at cleware. They connect through USB and work really well. Wrote a tool for it for easy controlling their devices: clewarecontrol. They also have humidity sensors.
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
If you want to build it into your Web site: the National Weather Service has a per state RSS feed containing weather alerts. The URL is:
http://www.weather.gov/alerts/.rss
Where is a two letter state abbreviation. If you just want to let users access (quickly) weather reports via browser; I highly recommend the 'ForecastFox' extension to Firefox.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Point a webcam at a weather rock
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I wrote this hack some time ago. It uses the weatherbug data from several thousand weather stations around the country. I also did it in VB 6.0. Both are found here... http://www.munchfoot.com/forums/index.php?dlcatego ry=3
A project I would like to see is remote enviromental monitoring. Not just all the information that a weather station would give, but things like particulates in the air (for ashma suffers).* Pollution concentration. For those near bodies of water. Monitor all that. This application is one example of distribution plus the Internet working in the OSS community.
*A les people forget. You don't need lots of money to make some scientific instruments.
Try http://www.ambientweather.com/. The Weather Exchange program is virus / adware free, no networking fees, and you can create your own website.
...According to the makers of the Operating System it installs on.
I think I'll take the opinion of an uninterested 3rd party that has billions of dollars to risk over your company's opinions on its own software, TYVM.
Let's not forget the history of your company and it's ties with the some of the worst spyware in history, like Gator. As it stands your software presently by default bundles and installs 3rd party components that clearly are spyware, but the WeatherBug executables themselves are not, when copied to another system and run individually, spyware.
That makes your software nothing more than a fence for spyware. Most people in the world call fences for what they do: theive. In your case you are a fence for spyware, so your software is called spyware, capice?
The moment WeatherBug is available as a standalone application with no extra software bundled with it or reccomended for installation it could be classified as purely spyware free.
I'll be waiting until that day. Hell shall freeze over first.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Seems like there are a lot of methods to acquire data from sensors. As I am not a web person, what is the simplest method effective method to periodically update a website with the acquired sensor information (and potentially data trend images). Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Geccie
I'll bite... While I think just leaving all mod points off of it would have sufficed, he got modded down because he didn't answer the clearly-posted and described question. He wanted help earlier in the process than this, so this guy's suggestions, while they may have been remotely relevant later, do little if anything to help him in the first place. Honestly, I think this one comes down to a case of needing to read and understand the question, and then respond on ly if you have useful insight to share. If he asks about hardware, give him a hardware answer. If he asks how he should get data from the software that came with his device to his webpage, this answer might have helped.
How do I go about setting up a weather meter (temperature, humidity, wind velocity, and so forth) so that its results can be integrated into an already established website?