Weather station details
Hardware
La Crosse WS2305 console*.
The weather station used for collecting the data is a La Crosse WS2305 (very similar to the WS2300, WS2310 and WS2315 models). It consists of a console, an outdoor thermometer/humidity sensor (in a Stevenson screen), a wind sensor (anemometer) and a tipping bucket rain gauge. The console records indoor temperature, indoor humidity and air pressure. The rain gauge measures approximately 0.5 mm with each tip of the bucket.
The station runs in wired mode, and sends data to the console every 8 seconds. The WS2305 is capable of wireless data transfer but this increases the recording interval to around 30 seconds, which is not frequent enough for wind gust data. Even in wired mode some of the wind gusts may not be recorded if they occur in the 8 second interval between recordings. Wired mode is more reliable for data quality, and it has the added bonus of providing power to the external sensors through the cable.
All cable is standard 4 core telephone wire, using modular RJ11 connectors to extend the cables where required. Some users of these weather stations have needed to replace the anemometer cable but I haven't experienced any problems with the standard wiring.
The console is connected via a serial cable to an old PC (550 MHz Pentium 3) running 24 hours a day. A UPS provides about 15-30 minutes of backup power during blackouts, but during longer power outages the weather data is not updated. A high speed broadband link is used for data transfer to this site and to log data to the MySQL database.
Software
Weather Display screenshot.
The software used to process the data is Weather Display. It works well with the La Crosse WS23xx weather stations and has a range of options for customising and manipulating the data. Data from the weather station is logged and uploaded to a MySQL database every minute. The data is then able to be displayed on this site by using queries to extract the relevant information.
Future plans for this site include the ability to graph data over time and to make available a 'snapshot' of the weather from any selected date.
*Image of WS2305 console used with permission, La Crosse Technology, France.