Hi folks,

The good folks at Western Power have donated a "surplus to use" Davis weather station to us here in Geraldton and I've arranged with Point Moore Volunteer Marine Rescue to have it mounted at their building, so we'll have a more accurate view of what's going on AT the beach in Geraldton for the first time. (The two weather stations we have now are located 1: about 3km out to sea in the shipping channel ("Geraldton Offshore") and 2. about 10km inland at the airport.) Neither is particularly reflective of the wind on the beach in most instances.

Laurie has kindly agreed to take the feed and create a new SeaBreeze reporting channel.

I'm a bit stuck at the moment and need someone who can help me with getting the code up and running to make it all work.

I've got some basic Linux skills but I'm struggling with getting the serial port from the weather station to talk to the PC that runs the code and I need some help from someone who does this sort of thing regularly. Ideally, someone locally, but I think we could probably do it remotely.

Going to set it up with WeeWx weather software on either a laptop running Elementary O/S or possibly a Raspberry Pi running Debian/Raspbian.

Anyone out there willing to volunteer a few hours to help us out?

If we can get this going, you'll now be able to see what the wind is REALLY like here in Geraldton AT THE BEACH, rather than having infer it from Cauncy's posts of the Offshore weather station! ;-)

PM me if you would be so kind to be able to help. No urgency -- sometime next week would be fine.

Thanks in advance!

Robbo

Im no Linux expert, but if you got no better offers Im a Computer Science Major.. or as everyone calls me a Programmer. I'm in Perth.

Would have been so much cooler if you had replied
01011001 01100101 01110011 00100000 01101001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01101000 01100101 01101100 01110000

Love it Robo
We can piss off all of Australia with our wind
And do it live
Your a f.......g legend

In the mean time I'll keep everyone updated

Hey Rob, have you thought about setting it up at Point Moore and seeing how it works before going to the trouble of connecting it to the Internet?
I wonder with the sand dunes, lighthouse and trees how clean the wind is there to measure.

The wind meter on my setup at Horrocks is miles off even though it is above the dunes and I would have thought in clean air.

Cheers

Basically you need /dev/ttyS0 reporting on your device. The question is if serial port is enabled?

To read from serial with Perl, you'll need about 100-150 lines of code. There are heaps of examples on the Net.

To feed a mysql db with data, you might need up to 1000 lines of code.

Hope this helps.

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dbabicwa said..

Basically you need /dev/ttyS0 reporting on your device. The question is if serial port is enabled?

To read from serial with Perl, you'll need about 100-150 lines of code. There are heaps of examples on the Net.

To feed a mysql db with data, you might need up to 1000 lines of code.

Hope this helps.

Thanks mate. There are relatively explicit instructions on the WeeWx help pages and existing config files already tailored to address this model of weather station, but I'm not adept enough at Linux to know how to poll the port to see whether it's feeding any data out or how to troubleshoot it if it isn't. I've had a contact from a good soul in Perth who's coming up this way in Dec so we're gonna have a crack at it in late Dec after a few good sessions at Coros! Hopefully, have it on-air by early Jan!

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Dave Whettingsteel said..
Hey Rob, have you thought about setting it up at Point Moore and seeing how it works before going to the trouble of connecting it to the Internet?
I wonder with the sand dunes, lighthouse and trees how clean the wind is there to measure.

The wind meter on my setup at Horrocks is miles off even though it is above the dunes and I would have thought in clean air.

Cheers

Thanks Dave,

Should be pretty clear there as Pt Moore sits out in the water pretty far away from pretty much everything, especially to the south where the wind comes from.

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EternalNoob said..
Im no Linux expert, but if you got no better offers Im a Computer Science Major.. or as everyone calls me a Programmer. I'm in Perth.

Thanks for the offer mate. Think we got it sorted now. Will let you know if we need some additional brain power at some stage. Cheers for the offer!