Weekend project: Weather Station
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.Â
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
Looks good but the cables are looking a bit messy, hope you’re planning on doing a neat bit of cable tying!
Comment by T-Dawg — May 26, 2008 @ 12:47 pm
I’ve just bought the WH -1080PC too. I’ve noticed that the temperature reading appears to be off by about +3 degrees centigrade. Also the contrast on the liquid crystal display is poor! Is there any way to adjust these things please? There is nothing in the manual about it.
Thanks in advance.
Comment by Ken Harvey — June 24, 2008 @ 8:46 am
It’s like good ,but i thing is better to put a bigest radiation shield ,because this one is small over to out temp/hum sensor and maybe to say little more temps .
Comment by Dimitris — July 19, 2008 @ 8:54 pm
Hi Grant ! I saw your blog with the weather station project. You’ve done a nice job. You could have accomplished more if you should have bought a La Crosse 2300, I guess for the same money with better performances, especially in the wired mode. If you want to have accurate readings in the temperature section you have to build a Stevenson screen with a fan aspirated tube inside.
If you are interested I can tell you what I did and how much it costed in all, not very expensive and I did everything in the do-it-yourself style.
It is always nice to know somebody who is interested in weather observation like I do. All the best from Romania, Eugen Radu, Oradea
Comment by EUGEN RADU — July 19, 2008 @ 9:32 pm
I’ve just got one of these brand new off ebay for fifty quid. It’s installed and working but I’m itching to get the weather data published on the web.
Bit cheeky I know, but any chance of getting hold of your software?
Comment by Derek Hill — August 2, 2008 @ 8:54 pm
Hi Derek - Sorry for the three week late response, but this comment got caught up in my spam trap along with offers to ‘increase my girth’.
Please see my latest post on this subject here: http://www.grantgibson.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/08/23/weather-station-web-publishing-software/
Let me know if it sounds of interest.
Comment by grant — August 23, 2008 @ 4:58 pm
I installed the analog Elecsa Astrotouch yesterday. The sensors are mounted on a 6 meter heigh aluminum pole in the backyard. System seems to work fine, exept a false readout of the rainsensor (11.1 mm in dry weather !) Regards, Peter.
Comment by Peter Kempenaers — February 6, 2009 @ 12:44 pm
Peter - I had a similar issue on my first day. It turned out that I had moved the rain sensor during installation, triggering the magnetic ‘trap door’ to open and register rainfall.
Hopefully it’s the same issue with yours… it should go back to zero once it isn’t being moved around.
Comment by grant — February 11, 2009 @ 7:24 pm
[…] with motion detection so I can see people entering and leaving the driveway and, more recently, connected a wireless weather station to give regular Elderslie weather […]
Pingback by Grant Gibson » Weekend project: Putting my doorbell online — March 29, 2009 @ 10:08 am
Hi! Its very interesting what you did.
I just send you a mail asking something about your project.
Thanks,
Joel.
Comment by Jo — April 28, 2009 @ 3:18 pm
To Eugene Radu
Can you send a description of the
Stevenson screen with a fan aspirated tube inside?
I have a WH 1080 PC and the outdoor temperature is about 3ª higher than the local weather station, cos to my home.
Comment by luis cuenca — July 29, 2009 @ 1:09 pm
Hi Grant,
I guess you solved your problem with the rain sensor reporting wrong values at sunny days.
I’m living in Germany and I have a Fine Offset WH1080 station since a month.
I got rain readings during brilliant sunny days, up to 0.9 and 1.2 mm.
I realised that the gauge of the sensor fliped to the other side, when I tipped on the top of the sensor housing. I realised further, that birds landed on the rainsensor. I mounted the rainsensor on a seperate solid mount directly on the roof. Since this modification I had no more any wrong rain reading.
My next project regarding the rainsensor is a heating regulation circuit to melt the snow on the rainsensor.
I use extension cables of 3m for the rainsensor and 10m for the windsensors, transmitter is under the roof on the north side of my house at a dry place.
Unfortunately I translated my Cumulus weatherstation SW to German language but if you would like to have a look at it:
wetter.hausmann-filder.de
Have a great day and best regards
Juergen
Comment by Juergen Hausmann — September 8, 2009 @ 4:05 pm
Hi Juergen,
That’s interesting about the rain sensor. I thought that the small door that registers rain drops was a bit too delicate. I always have to be careful to disconnect the rain sensor before moving it, otherwise I get massive spikes in rainfall!
Fortunately I don’t have an issue with birds landing on the rain sensor here. I guess there are other things nearby that they prefer to land on.
Thanks for letting me know about the Cumulus software. I’m still using the EasyWeather software that comes with the weather station, but the Cumulus software looks much better. I might give it a go when I finish off my other projects.
Regards,
Grant
Comment by grant — September 10, 2009 @ 11:18 am
Hi,
I have had my Astrotouch for a year now and everything seems fine APART from the rain gauge. It has reported no rain for the last 5 months. I have tried to clean it (get spiders out) but ….. nothing. I live in Cumbria so I’m sure that it has rained in the past 5 months!!!!
Any ideas???
Comment by steve — December 6, 2009 @ 6:55 pm