Currently, the top 3 weather stations are down, Beeman, East Gloucester, and O’Maley. As some people may know I have a new job in Franklin, MA, so I am not able to take care of them. If someone would be up to this task please let me know. These machines probably just need to be rebooted or something silly like that, but unfortunately it is serious enough that I can’t get to it over my connection here.
East Gloucester is the only station giving me trouble, but not too much trouble. I think it is suffering from a bad batteries, let this be a lesson to you, well two lessons A- if a deal on eBay is too good to be true it probably is, and B- don’t buy batteries on eBay.
Second, I found Windsync crashed/closed when I logged in this morning. It looks as if with the cold weather the signal strength is going down, and the program loses sync and crashes. I think moving the computer will make it happy, maybe to the 3rd (2nd? I can never tell at that school) floor will help.
Also, if any robots are reading this, Stop The Spam please! It’s getting annoying.
The Windspire data for (Most of) August and September has been uploaded to a Google Fusion table. It’s not live, I just dumped it there: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1lQKGza3tacUmkjxWLbI93so1axCIQ1nHrBxv30U It’s a really big file so far, (2.6 Million lines!) so we’ll see if Google can digest it.
In other news, O’Maley is recording data, but there is nothing there, which usually means the ISS is down. It’s been cloudy almost all week, so I’m guessing that the battery is low / dead so it needs sun to charge it. This stinks because I thought I changed it a couple of months ago.
Lastly, I received a great ‘kudos’ on the Gloucester Public Schools staff email, it’s a nice little ego boost, thanks all!
At approximately 20:00 yesterday it stopped recording data. A quick reboot solved that even though I looked around first to make sure nothing was wrong first, instead of the classic Windows trick of ‘reboot and ask questions later’. I also noticed it hasn’t been updating the rxcheck.png file since April, I have to get to the bottom of that, eventually. 
I finally got to tear into the West Parish ISS, only to find it is immaculate! It has the trademark date of 2002 just like the other stations, but it is extremely clean and looks like it was only put up a year ago. I think I will leave it alone except for changing the battery and not change the cap as I had previously planned to do. Now I feel silly for taking the whole thing down.
I hung out at O’Maley for a bit today and checked the station only to find out it was down, and I couldn’t connect to it. Come to find out someone had tripped the breaker on the power strip that runs the 5 port linksys switch the network cable is plugged into. I sense problems ahead with that switch, since I have seen more then one overheat and die, maybe I can run a ‘homerun’ line to an hp switch.
Oh! While I was at O’Maley I played with the Windspire. I now have the XBee Digi modem that it connects to, and I can see the thing spinning on the Windsync software. With a lot of luck, I might be able to put that online too, one of my long term goals.
I got to go on the O’Maley roof and put up the weather station, and now we are getting good data! It is also just in time for some high winds, and they seem to be reporting accurately.
Also, slow progress has been made with the MySQL graphs, since now I have to together enough to run a decent looking 24 hour graph of wind direction and air pressure. But I am reading about http://saratoga-weather.org which has some nice looking templates that I might use instead of ‘rolling my own’.
This weekend I fixed a rain gauge! I bought a set of reed switches on ebay, waited a month for them to arrive from China (literally) and they didn’t work since they were too sensitive and would always stay closed when mounted in the rain gauge. So I went to You Do It electronics in Needham and bought a couple of good quality reed switches, but when I put them in they had the same problem. Finally, last week I called up Davis and asked where I could buy them, and they offered to send me a bunch free of charge! I just put them in and they work great!
In other news, the O’Maley station is down so I could put the new temp / humidity sensor in it. Now I just need to schedule time to put it back up. You can see the process here > http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=14294.msg144400#msg144400