Weather Nerdery

I’ve wanted to set up/build a weather station for a while; lazyness and apathy were mostly what stopped me. Last week, I bit the bullet and bought an Oregon Scientific RMS300 (change from 35 quid from OS themselves).
It comes in two parts: a base station with a screen and built in temperature/humidity sensor and an included wireless sensor (by default labelled “outside” as a serving suggestion).

The supplied (via download) software, “OS Weather”, is…pretty shit. It doesn’t work on Windows 7 (“trial version” available “end of June”, apparently) and I couldn’t be bothered setting up a virtual machine to screw about with it.

Next up was Weather Station Data Logger. It’s good, but I have more than enough machines running 24/7 without adding a Windows one (and again don’t particularly want a Windows VM). I have machines which do run near-enough-24/7 but run Debian GNU/Linux so the ideal solution would run under that and ideally headless.

Enter the WMR100 module which will do all the work of getting the data out of the base station and its wireless sensors and present them in a fairly easy to manipulate format:

DATA[20100622001211]:type=TEMP,sensor=0,smile=0,trend=,temp=24.7,humidity=42,
dewpoint=0.0

Next magic trick will be to get the data I collected with WSDL and the data that’s being collected with WMR100, stick it all together in some way, and start getting it into graphs of some description. rrdtool‘s the obvious candidate.

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