On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 13:53, Nick Rout wrote: > Following on from the weather station thread on clug, i was wondering if > anyone knows of any weather station units available in NZ. I think DSE > used to sell one that had a serial port, but I cannot see that one on > their website any more. Of course it will be connected to a linux box!
Yes, the DSE one is definitely no longer available. IIRC it was a rebranded Oregon Scientific unit which is no longer manufactured. > thats the sort of thing I want, consumer grade, in the order of $100.00. Good luck. The DSE one cost $499, but measured temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and rainfall. It calculated other information such as dew point and wind chill, and did have a nice console and display and a serial output. I wouldn't expect anything else to be much cheaper, even with fewer features. A local (Christchurch) weather station was built and is run by Jeff Northcott. His page details some of the instruments he has built, and some he has bought: http://weather.northcott.co.nz/ This link is a collection of weather stations around New Zealand, each one having various levels of detail: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/tmcgavin/current_nzweather.html and there are many other similar projects around the world (Google is, of course, your friend). I am using Dallas one-wire temperature sensors for measuring, er, temperature, but I have built an anemometer with the bearings from an old CD-ROM drive spindle motor and three ping-pong ball halves. I have also built a wind-vane using a bearing from a hard drive read head arm. Both of these instruments need tweaking before they are deployed. A rain gauge can be built fairly easily, and I plan to do that after the anemometer and wind vane are working. Jaycar (www.jaycar.co.nz) sell consumer rain gauges, and they and Dick Smith have desk-accessory style humidity and temperature sensors. I don't think they have serial outputs though. There is also the Dallas One-Wire Weather Station (http://www.ibutton.com/weather/) that is attractive, but a bit pricey, and has to be ordered from overseas. Jeff Northcott was thinking of adding an FAQ page to his weather website because he keeps getting email asking about this very topic. I will draw his attention to this thread. Hopefully the Slashd^H^H^H^H^H^H CLUG effect won't crash his server. HTH, Andy
