Goodies

2013-03-19

I have new toys on the way:
- A dr.Tech wireless weather station (WA-1070T, very similar to the ubiquitous Fine Offset WH-1080PC, which I had before)--I'll be adding (flawed) wind and precip data to my weather site in the near future; and
- one Raspberry Pi single-board microcomputer.

The Pi runs a version of Debian Linux--my favourite distro.  The weather station, like my first one three years ago, has a wireless receiver with USB computer input.

My plan is to sorta bungie the Pi to the back of the receiver, hook in the USB input, use the pywws scripts to read in the live data, and pipe that to my weather software.  I'll need quickly to write a little conversion program, to change the pywws data to something my system can handle.  I can have that mostly written-up in advance.

The Pi is coming with an AC adapter and WiFi dongle.  This means I can place the receiver in an optimal location, and the Pi will come along for the ride, burdened only by its power cable.  Meh--I can live with that.  I have a portable DVD player, with composite input, that I can use as a sweet little mini-monitor, too.

Heck, as the weather system itself is deployed in Linux, I could move the whole-shootin'-match over to the Pi and let it chug along.

The weather software itself will require some tweaking to handle the live wind and precip data.  I can do that in a few idle hours.

At some point, I'll have to polish- and package-up my software and Open-Source it.

So, to my neighbours:  the instrument mast is coming back!