Category Archives: Windspire

General Update and Windspire

Leave a reply

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.

Windspire progress and O’Maley

Leave a reply

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!

All Clear!

Leave a reply

I forgot to put up a ‘everything’s done!’ post.  Well, all the stations are back up and working very well.  West Parish has not shut down, Plum Cove has registered all the rain that just fell over the past few days, and East Gloucester is showing accurate humidity.

I also installed the computer for the Windspire, at the moment it is sitting there collecting data from Windsync and putting it in a daily csv file.  I also installed cygwin and MySQL workbench so soon I will be able to write a script or something to import those files into MySQL and do something cool with them.  It might be easier then I thought with the daily csv’s, since if I don’t want live data I can simply convert the file at the end of the day and leave it at that instead of trying to update on the fly with data coming in.

East Gloucester & Windspire progress

Leave a reply

I’ve been busy, but I just fixed the East Gloucester Station.  The humidity sensor was officially dead, so I needed to swap it out with the spare.  The anemometer was also bent, so not only were the cups out of alignment with each other, the whole mechanism was wobbling.  I think I will swap that out with the spare as well, which the spare is actually from Veteran’s which I fixed, but it still works better.

Also, I posted a question on the weewx forums about posting data from the Windspire.  Someone suggested running a separate Windows box and rsyncing the csv file to a linux box for distribution.  This is a great idea and I think I will put it into motion, so at least I have some data to work with when I finally get to use it.

Next, Plum Cove, which should just be a reed switch replacement, but we will see.

West Parish ISS and O’Maley network

Leave a reply

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.