wviewweather.com

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

The next big thing I am planning to do is abstract the station interface of wview so it can be used with other weather stations. This is a significant undertaking...

The first planned new station is the Vaisala WXT-510 Weather Transmitter (http://www.vaisala.com/businessareas/instruments/products/weathermulti-sensor).

This will be an NMEA 0183 protocol interface with no data logger, just current sensor readings. I plan to continue to use the WLK file format for archive purposes.

Why this station? I will divulge more on that later but suffice it to say that it is for more than one user...

Not that I will be able to get to them anytime soon, but are there other stations any of you are interested in? Development will require a loan/donation of the station to me for develop and initial testing. After that, a commitment to do release testing on the station would be required.

Mark

chrisale · Joined: 09 Nov 2005 Posts: 187

I try to encourage everyone I know who wants a weather station to get a Vantage Pro because I think they are the best...

that said, you can get some great deals on Oregon Scientific stations (they're at Costco right now). So it'd be cool if you could add support for those stations. I don't know, however, whether they even support data capture/archiving/PC interconnect.

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

The Vaisala is a "near" professional quality instrument.

I agree, the Vantage Pro is an excellent choice for consumer grade stations - the driving force behind the Vaisala implementation is to drastically improve the quality of weather data submitted to CWOP for NWS forecasting purposes...

Mark

THogland · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 33

I looked this up, and after I stopped sweating and drooling I looked at the specs, and I'm surprised how well the Vantage Pro compares. Temp and wind isn't as good, but rainfall and pressure is as good or better.

I'm impressed that a comsumer-grade $500 console can stack up this well to a $2000 semi-pro sensor suite.

Having said that, if someone wanted to send me one to help beta-test the next version of wview, I wouldn't turn it away. There's just something sexy about ultrasonic wind speed sensors Smile

bodemory · Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 43

I'd be happy to see Davis Weather monitor stations supported by wview.
I'm trying to find a similar software for it and none equals the simplicity and efficiency of wview!

Brice

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

Update:

The station abstraction is complete. I am testing the new (and new means lots new in this case) version of wview on my site now. A few kinks to work out but it is running very nicely in general. Documentation, an abstraction of the "vpconfig" script so there is a general "wvstationconfig" script which points at the appropriate station-specific script, etc. still remains. This will start release series 3.0.0 of wview (wish I hadn't jumped the gun on bumping the old version to 2.0.0, but oh well).

Some notable changes:
- a new station API was created to cleanly define new station interfaces with well-defined API function prototypes
- if a station generates archive records (like the VP), wview will use them for the WLK database - if it does not, wview will generate the archive records based on the sensor readings
- wview no longer uses the VP HILOW packet to report high and low values but rather computes them based on the sensor readings (the WXT510 and other stations do not have the concept of HILOW packets).
- A brand new "sensor" API was developed to abstract storing sensor readings and extracting HILOW data and times as well as averages over a given time frame.
- the "daemon" directory in the distro is gone - replaced by a "stations" directory which currently contains a "common" subdirectory (all station generic code) and a "VantagePro" subdirectory (VP-specific code).
- "vpconfig" has also been moved underneath the stations/VantagePro directory
- as a result of the new sensor API and generating HILOW data internally, the computedData utilities were modified and optimized
- sunrise and sunset will be computed internally and I will be adding twilight and astronomical rise and set computations/HTML tags as well

I will try to post a pre-release version of the 3.0.0 branch in the next week or two - I really want to spend some time verifying all these changes and additions. Volunteers to beta test it would be appreciated.

Mark

bhnb · Joined: 28 Nov 2005 Posts: 127

Mark

I'll volunteer to be a beta tester.

I do have one question though. If you're discarding HILOW values, does that mean that if for example there's a gust of wind which starts immediately after one reading but has subsided before the next reading is taken (maybe 15 seconds later) it is not recorded, no matter how high it is?

Cheers

Jon

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

Hey Jon!

It *would* mean that except for the case when the weatherstation generates archive records (such as the Vantage Pro), the archive record HILOW vals for temp and wind are "checked" against the sensor contents for the interval and updated if there is better data in the archive record.

It definitely means that for stations which do not generate archive records - but most do provide a wind gust value for current readings (the Vantage Pro does not, other than the aforementioned entry in the archive record).

Thanks for the offer, I only have Rain Season Start capability to add to wview (since again, we will no longer use the VP-provided one) then I will send you and the other volunteers a tarball to play with for a few days.

Mark

bodemory · Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 43

Mark,

I'll volunteer to be a tester as well if WM stations are supported.
I'd like to stress that I'm willing to give any necessary help to allow wview supporting WMII stations
as a lot of people are using it. So I can use mine as a tesbed.

However, I'd prefer not to test wview on the VPP located in Switzerland since
it is used now for operational purposes (observatory+ski resort operators).

Thanks!
Brice

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

As I stated earlier, I can't port wview to a given station without a loan or donation of that station for development/testing purposes. Further, I haven't added any *new* station support at this time - just significant changes to allow it in the future.

Thanks for the offer,
Mark

NorwegianWould · Joined: 07 Jan 2006 Posts: 23

Will the new version be:

1. Retaining the YYYYMMDD date format - or providing this format through options?
2. Providing a standard HH:MM time format (even if it is not the default)

for all date/time related data?

These things are important for me since I need something I can rely on in future. With the above 2 formats it is relatively easy to convert them to any another format using a couple of lines of script.

Jeremy

mteel · Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 435 Location: Collinsville, TX

It will retain that date format in the same way the current version does - if "metric" is configured for wview units. Nothing changed there...

I am planning to go with a 24-hour time stamp for all future versions of wview - the "am/pm" jazz is gone.

See: http://www.weather.teel.ws/ as an example.