thanks for the details. it helps to understand your application. On Friday, July 28, 2017 at 8:53:54 AM UTC-4, voyagesdedavid wrote:
> - do you require a physical console to display the data? > > No. I mean, it would be cool to have something wall-mounted (and backlit) > that we could just have on our living room wall, so that we could say, walk > over and press to get the weather report and all, but that's not > essential. > you can put a display on the pi, or you can get a cheap tablet and point it at a web page generated by weewx. > - is there power available where the sensors will be located? where the > console/basestation will be located? what kind of power? > > No. That's why I asked about solar panels. There is power where the base > station will be, as that will be inside the home. If you mean an LCD > console, then of course that can be located anywhere. If you mean a > physical server that can handle the data, then that's a Raspberry PI. > the pi is not the most energy efficient device - you'll need a pretty big battery to power it through more than a day or two with no sun. another option you might consider is acurite hardware with the acurite bridge (don't bother with the usb consoles). the sensor unit is all-in-one, but you can collect data from many sensors by sniffing traffic from the bridge. that way your sensors are all wireless and battery powered, the bridge is wired ethernet, and the pi is wired ethernet on the same network as the bridge. acurite sells a wide range of sensors, including lightning sensors, pool temperature, refrigerator/freezer (remote probe). you can build your own solar chargers for the batteries (they are all AA batteries - 2 for most sensors, more for the integrated sensor unit). if acurite offered separate rain and wind sensors instead of just the all-in-one it would be ideal low-end equipment. > - is a hardware data logger required? preferred? > > Not sure what this means. If it means what I think it does, then no. The > server can handle all of the logging. > sometimes it is nice to have a logger in the weather station hardware. that way if the pi loses power the station will still log data, then the pi grabs the logged data when it comes back online. it just depends how much redundancy you need. if you use a quality sd card and configure the pi so that it uses a tmpfs for logging and other minimize-writes tricks, it should be quite reliable. but beware of power supply issues, thermal issues, extreme humidity, and lightning strikes. and squirrels or other critters (the little red squirrels like to chew through everything). > - is there a preferred communication mechanism, e.g., wifi, bluetooth, > wired (serial, usb, tcp/ip)? > > Wireless, definitely. > so you'll have to decide whether you want the station to do its own wifi, or have a pi connected via usb to the station, with the pi connecting via wifi to your network. you'll have more control with the latter, and you can more easily use external/directional/amplified antennas as well, if necessary. > Define remote access. > the older fine offset stations have a nasty firmware glitch that causes them to periodically lock up - they still record data, but you cannot access it because the usb is frozen. the only solution is to power cycle the station. the only way to do that remotely (or automatically), is to use a controllable powered hub. if you deploy one of these stations at a location where you do not always have physical access, you need to automatically detect and power cycle the station. the wmr300 stations require a manual reset of the rain counter - there is no way to do it via software. so if you do not have physical access to the station when the counter reaches its maximum value, you won't get any rain data. so my query about remote access is to find out whether you'll have direct access to the station, or if the station will be sited such that direct access is difficult or only periodic. > - where do you want the data to end up? > > On our webserver (and available to anyone). We already have > ourdomain.com/jira, ourdomain.com/confluence and ourdomain.com/horde for > our JIRA, Confluence and groupware stuff. My wife and I share calendars > and use the Atlassian tools for holiday planning, task management as well > as an inventory tool for our IT 'estate'. So ultimately, these data will > be on ourdomain.com/weather. > weewx will generate web pages - that was in its original design, and it does it quite well (the cheetah templating system is incredibly powerful, and not very difficult to learn). you can even use the templates to integrate weather data into php-based web sites, or wordpress, or many other systems. but there are other options as well if you should want real-time display of sensor data (using MQTT, for example), or if you want to combine weather data with other data (using influx, for example), or if you want to feed into a dashboard/monitoring system (emoncms, for example). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
