This weekend I put together a wee project I’d been thinking about for a while — a web-enabled weather station in my back garden.

Ever since I moved out of the city a few years ago I’ve taken a greater interest in the weather.  When we moved into our new house in Elderslie I noticed the previous owner had an outdoor temperature sensor installed.  She’d taken it away with her, but the bracket was still there.  I bought the same model and installed it a couple of weeks after moving in.  It’s been really handy, but my inner geek has always wanted more!

Last week I noticed Maplin had reduced the price of their touchscreen USB weather station to £80.  It’s branded Watson W-8681, but I think it’s more commonly called the WH1080PC. It seemed to have everything I was looking for: wind, temperature and rain sensors, RF wireless connection and a USB PC interface.  The only thing that was missing was a reliable way to mount it outdoors.  I bought a suitable 20mm pole and TV aerial bracket from B&Q – total cost about £11.

Installation

Putting the weather station together was dead easy, but finding somewhere to install it outside wasn’t.  I tried lots of options, but everywhere had problems – too low, too sheltered, too close to the neighbour’s dog, etc.  I finally settled on the garage, which I had been trying to avoid on account of the solid concrete walls.  An hour of drilling and two carbide-tipped drill bits later it was in place.

The rest of the installation was dead easy.  The touchscreen receiver has excellent range, and I was able to get a signal from the outdoor station everywhere in the house.  The PC connection was simple too — just run a small EXE file (no installer) and it starts picking up the signal.

Getting it online

I had a browse around for software to allow my weather station to publish directly to the web.  I was really disappointed with what I found — options that people were recommending on forums were quite expensive ($70+) and seemed pretty amateur for the price.   I installed a couple of freeware/trial options, but again these either didn’t work at all, or were really disappointing.

So there was nothing else for it: I had to build my own weather software from scratch.  I set up a MySQL database and wrote a PHP script to extract data directly from the desktop software supplied with the weather station.  It gets updates every 30 mins and writes them to the database.  If the weather station receiver isn’t connected to the PC for any reason, it stores results in its internal memory.  The extraction script automatically catches up when it’s next connected. 

I then wrote a some display scripts to query the database and produce graphs over time.  At the moment the graphs only show the last 24hrs worth of results.  I’ll add more options in the future, but there’s no point at the moment as I only have a couple of days worth of data stored.

See live results from the Elderslie Weather Station

Ever since I packed away my old Amiga A1200 I’ve been a Windows user.  Starting from Windows 3.0 I’ve been through virtually all the evolutions — 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, NT, 95, 98, ME (eek!), 2000, XP and Vista.  I’ve always favoured the universal nature of windows, with a tool for every conceivable task, over the supposed simplicity of MacOS or the geek appeal of Linux.

At work there are a lot of windows haters.  Someone always has an opinion on how a particular task would have been easier on a Mac or under Linux.   So a couple of weekends ago curiosity got the better of me and I decided to install a couple of alternative OSes. 

First up was the easy one, Ubuntu Hardy Heron.  For a bit of extra interest I decided to run it in a virtual machine under VMWare.  After all, I guess there’s not much point in having a Quad Core CPU if you’re not going to properly multi-task.  Installation was dead simple: Install VMWare Player, browse to the Virtual Appliance marketplaceand download the Hardy Heron image.  All in, it took 30 mins max, including the download time.

Next was the slightly trickier Mac OSX Leopard.  I wanted to run it natively for best performance, so that required a bit of disk partitioning and boot menu installers.  The hardware setup on my Dell desktop made it tricky.  It’s running a RAID disk array which requires software support.  I’ve got an external USB drive that would’ve done the trick, but I didn’t fancy disabling the SATA RAID array just to make this happen.   So instead, I decided to install it on my Acer Laptop — it’s still a decent spec (Core2, 2GB) which is perfectly good for OSX.  I won’t go into the detail of the install here, but it’s enough to say the online tutorials generally seem to work.  After a couple of hours of fiddling we were up and running.

Here’s the final setup:

(Laptop running OSX Leopard, Desktop running Vista over dual monitors with Ubuntu virtual machine on the left screen)

When I was in New York last summer I picked up an AppleTV set top box.  Personally I think it’s the bargain of the century — for £200 I got a fast, virtually silent, easy-to-use replacement for my noisy old Windows Media Centre PC.   Best of all, I managed to sell the old Media Centre on Ebay for £270.

I liked the AppleTV when I first plugged it in with its Version 1.o software.  I liked it even more when they added YouTube in 1.1.   But it was Take 2 that really made it special.  Being able to find and stream Podcasts directly on AppleTV is my favourite addition.

However, the one niggle I’ve always had is the need to convert videos to MP4 then add them to iTunes before I could watch them.  Software like iPodifier made the process pretty simple, but on my old ‘always on’ server machine (a 1.4GHz Celeron) it would take a couple of hours to convert a typical half-hour show.

Fortunately, a group of like-minded individuals have now come up with the solution, and it works both on PC and Mac.  Basically, the key is to build a ‘patchstick’ — a bootable USB memory stick that you insert into the AppleTV which then enables SSH access into your set-top box!  There’s a fairly long-winded process available to Mac users, but if you’re on a PC you can now shortcut the whole process thanks to ATV4Windows.com.

(more…)

A few weeks ago I bought a Peugeot Ludix Blaster RS12 scooter.  It’s really just to get me to work and back.   Between parking and petrol, taking my car to work was costing me about £9 a day (£4.50 petrol + £4.50 parking, and that doesn’t account for tyres, petrol, servicing, etc).  The scooter isn’t properly run in yet, but already it’s costing me just £1.50 a day in fuel and is free to park at my work.  At that rate, it’ll have completely paid for itself in about nine months.

The only thing that annoyed me about the Blaster as standard was its instrument panel.  The odometer is in kilometers, there’s no trip counter, the speedometer is pretty inaccurate and it doesn’t have a clock.  I decided the best way to solve all those problems at once was to fit a cycle computer.

I settled on the Specialized Speedzone wired cycle computer.  It has a fairly heavy duty cable and two well-spaced, hard plastic buttons — perfect for operating with thick motorcycle gloves.  It cost me £20 from Dales in Glasgow.

Details of how I fitted it are after the jump…

(more…)