Weather Report Development Log Book

12 December 2011

  1. The circa 2003 VantagePro weather station /console combination has failed from time to time. Thus far the failures have not been lengthy. Perhaps the wire / plug giggling that followed these failures kept it like that. However the last failure persisted for several days and prompted me to unpack the new Davis VantageVue that I had purchased a couple of weeks ago. Then the VantagePro suddenly started up again and so the installation and setup of the VantageVue will have to wait for the New Year.

11 December 2011

  1. One of the perks associated with having picked Pietermaritzburg as a home town is fairly frequent failures of the water and electrical power supplies. To counter the water problem we have installed a water tank that collects water from the roof. To counter the electricity problem we have uninterruptible power supplies installed that provide enough backup power for us to shutdown computer system, if we happen to be at home at the time the outage occurs.
  2. Shutting down the UPS that supports the Linux box that runs VirtualBox that runs Windows XP that runs WeatherLink, required me to work through that chain in reverse every time the power was restored in order to bring up the weather page again. I also need to restart a Java program that copies some weather related images between the virtual XP box and the physical Linux box.
  3. While I have wanted to try and automated this from bootup for some time for obvious reasons, it is my pending absence for about three weeks that finally got me going.
  4. Now that the system starts up automatically, I need to find a process that will allow an operator, if one is present, to shut the system down with a single mouse click. If no operator is present, then the UPS needs to send a signal to the real box, that will initiate the shutdown before the UPS battery gets to the point where it is unable to sustain the system.

25 October 2011

  1. Added the text area containing details pertaining to the Weather Report and interpretation thereof.

15 October 2011

  1. Since the initial setup of the Weather Report page for viewing using a PC, I have brought about what I consider to be several enhancements of the site. These include:
    1. A separate page was introduced to present the weather report in a format suitable for viewing on mobile devices.
    2. The view of Town Hill as captured by the PICPMB webcam, was included to provide a more immediate view of what the current weather in the vicinity of the weather station was like.
    3. Smaller copies of this view as at 08:00, noon and 16:00 were included to enhance this interpretation of the weather conditions during the course of the day.
    4. Elements of the pages that could serve as links to associated web pages, were modified accordingly.
    5. Pietermaritzburg was introduced into the title section of the weather report to enhance the likelihood of the weather report pages being associated with the city,
    6. The date and time stamp that appears on the pages was brought about by some bash scripting on the Linux box further extending the degree to which the current system could be considered to be a crude hack.

19 September 2011

  1. When I first thought of setting up the PICPMB site, I immediately thought of adding a web cam to the site. Not long after that, after we had added the web cam to the Weather Underground site, I thought it would also be nice to have a weather report on the PICPMB site. That took longer.
  2. My first acquisition was an Oregon Scientific Venture, a hand held device that features a compass, a barometer, a thermometer and an altimeter as it's main functions. It is OK if you are prepared to calibrate it each time you venture out with it. The altimeter is great FUN WHEN TRAVELLING/walking IN undulating country side.
  3. My first consideration was to purchase an Oregon Scientific (WMR200) weather station. A close friend suggested a Davis Advantage Pro, and as he was able to lend me one, that is where I started.
    1. We set up the weather station in a suitable spot and taste the wireless link to the console our study (the place I mostly play and she mostly works). No problem. Because my Linux box in the study has a serial port, and because it is also responsible for the web cam, I hooked the Davis Console up to the Linux box. I then downloaded Weather View and spent hours trying to get it to communicate with the console. No Luck.
    2. I then installed Windows XP as a dual boot. It seemed to work, so I installed Virtual Box under Linux and tried to used the Windows XP dual boot image. Could not get that to work.
    3. So I installed Windows XP on the Virtual Box using a virtual disk. Booted XP, but could not get the serial port to work.
    4. Started to think the on board serial port was jinxed, so bought a serial card and tried that with all the permutations already described. Still no luck.
    5. Took the serial card out and tried again with the on board serial port. It then worked Weather Link running under Windows XP on a Virtual Box under Ubuntu Linux. First tested it with a shared director for the data transfer of the data from XP to Linux. That worked. Then tried to FTP the data from XP to the Linux host. That also worked, but would hang XP after a while. So it was back to the shared directory.
  4. That is where it is at the moment. For now I will work on improving the weather report format. As the present setup is a major hack, I will return to trying to communicate with the serial port under Linux, but using my own Java code. Then I will try and talk to console. Don not hold your breath.

Robert Dempster E-mail address robdkznza@gmail.com