We have this Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station. We've had it for at
least 12 or 14 years. For quite some time, we had it in our utility room
where it was out of the way. Because the utility room was kind of
central to the main part of the house, we also had our WiFi AP located
in that room, and they both ran off a small (Netgear) 5-port switch,
which relayed to our router at the far end of the house. Never had a
problem with it.
We recently started refreshing the utility room. Nothing drastic, just
fresh floor, paint, and trim. In the process we moved the WAP to a place
we call "the alcove", which is still fairly centrally located, but has
better clearance to the outside/deck area. So we moved the switch there
and put our VoIP phones on the switch with the WAP.
So the weather station is now on a dedicated ethernet connection back to
the router. Suddenly the weather station "stalls out" after a bunch of
"excessive collision/speed mismatch" errors. Sometimes it runs for 4 or
5 hours, sometimes it runs a day or two, but always gets to the stalling
out phase after a bunch of ethernet errors.
So I started looking into the ethernet interface on the weather station.
Turns out, it's an obsolete data logger contraption that Davis no longer
makes, and it runs 10Base-T half duplex. Erg. I got into the router and
set the port that it's on to 10/half dux, and it actually seems to run
longer this way, but still gets to the too many errors condition after a
while.
I think I've come to the conclusion that the funky little data logger
goober on the weather station is just not very robust. I think if I put
another switch or ethernet repeater co-located with the weather station,
I can get it back to the state of mostly working (or at least with a
stall rate that is measured in months/years instead of hours/days).
So what I'm looking for is the smallest/tiniest ethernet switch (or
maybe just a repeater) that can be installed on the wall next to the
weather station console as possible. This may be difficult, as the
Netgear fast switch we had there is only 4x4 inches. Just wondering if
there was something even smaller?
The other option is (maybe) a Raspberry Pi that has two ethernet ports
on it? We run the weather station with a Raspberry Pi 3 that is located
elsewhere on the LAN, but it only has 1 ethernet port. If there was one
with two, I could just plop the pi next to the weather station.
--
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
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