This station is a personal weather station (PWS). This means that there is no guarantee regarding its accuracy, nor any guarantee as to its reliability, and it certainly has no audit trail - which is apparently essential in this modern world, to quell nerves, ensure accountability, and replace common sense.
However, considering that there is nothing authoritative anywhere close to here, and that I've put a bit of time and effort into putting it all together, know its quirks, and that it is only a Personal Weather Station and satisfies my needs beautifully; then that makes it the next best thing, otherwise known as 'better than nothing'
It certainly beats wetting your finger, or looking at the old analogue gauge and wondering about its accuracy, or donning the hat and raincoat to check the rain gauge. Actually, I (we) get to do just that to compare how this tracks with reality, and so far so good!
The actual station comprises a mini computer, stand alone sensors, and software to query and publish the information retreived.
- The computer is a raspberry Pi 2 which is small, has low power usage, and with more than enough grunt to process and display the information as you see it here.
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The weather station consists of many individual 1-wire sensors from which the relavent data is collected.
- To process that data, the software used is WeeWX, an experimental weather software system written in Python.
That code runs on linux and is open source. This allows free use and access to the code thereby offering the opportunity to modify or extend the code as required, subject to it's GPL license.
Because of that license, the code has been extended by others and with that comes access to the OWFS software and a smart little driver written by mwall named owfs.py which uses OWFS to interface between the 1-wire sensors and weewx, thus completing this package nicely.
The skin, or design layout of the pages here, is an experimental skin avaliable in the main weewx repository - newskin under the Branch: newskin. It is a possible replacement for the Standard skin and is still under development.
This site has additional pages, not available with that skin but which are available by other means.
- Simple mods are slight changes to the skin.conf file, using the existing templates as a guide - these are seen here as the 'Rain forecasts (ext)', 'CFA fire rating (ext)' sections at the right of the page.
- Others are more complex - the BOM forecasts - where I borrow heavily from Darryns excellent skin which is, viewable at Carlingford weather, and for which the code is available on his github site, as the very presentable Responsive skin.
Last but not least, this raspberry pi runs with a read only filesystem ( Rorpi ) which minimizes the effects of power outages, and file system corruption.
If you wish to contact me, you can do so through the the github account linked immediately above or ...
