We moved up to the Washington state from California. Our weather is different enough from the local town or airport that I wanted my local weather station. I got the Davis Vantage Pro system with the little RS232 dongle – it is part of the software package.

I use the wview weather software that runs on a old Cyrex 800MHz Linux box running Debian “Squeeze” release. I tried to use my Solaris box but it wouldn’t work. I modified to compile except that it required the libusb drivers which don’t play in Solaris. The wview works with a variety of weather stations and some use USB. It isn’t modular and insisted having the drivers.

What I use Wview for is to collect data from the weather station and does a tag replace of html templates with the weather data. It does some computation on the weather data such as using temperature and humidity to get dew point. It has code for widgets like graphs and dials that are converted to pictures. It then can be used to host locally or sent to an outside server.

I also have an Adagio A612 outdoor camera pointing to my lab. This uploads my photos every so often to my server and I upload it to my website so I can see my local weather anywhere. I ran a wire from my switch through a POE box to the camera. There is a little box that holds the Ethernet connector as it is the only part of the camera that isn’t made for outdoors.

In the wview software I replaced the dials in wview with some great javascript SteelSeries by Gerrit Grunwald. Javascript is a great language and the code is “advanced” here. There wasn’t much documentation but once I understood what was going on, it wasn’t a problem.

There are two sets of files, one is just a textual compression (not for human consumption) of the other file. Each gauge has properties which can be set and a bit of fooling around will get you to what you need.

I think the Skeumorphic UI added style to the design that I wouldn’t ordinarily have but I don’t think we should be bound by it. So I broke it a bit and used the back ground color normally is used for preset ranges to indicate min and max values for the day. I also added a little color tick to the temperature gauge to indicate indoor temperature. There were some dedicated dials with dual dials but I had to kludge the wind speed for average and current speeds.

There is a local link to the weather station in the menu bar.