OT: Weather stations

[Stewart C. Russell]

Fraser Campbell wrote:
> 
> Let's say I wanted to continually measure/record temperature, wind speed, 
> humidity, barometric pressure and precipitation.  Is there such a thing as a 
> personal weather station which can be mounted on the roof and interfaced with 
> my PC?

Yep. I build weather stations.

Systems that are cheap and can do the job include Davis Instruments 
<http://davisnet.com/>. I think that True North Power 
<http://www.truenorthpower.com/> in Lion's Head (near the big-ass wind 
turbine on the Bruce Peninsula) are the local dealers.

Davis make some wireless systems that mean you don't have to drill for 
cables. They unfortunately have a very sucky website which just crashed 
Mozilla for me.

If you want more accuracy and reliability, you'll have to go for 
something custom from Campbell Scientific. These are absurdly expensive 
(esp. considering that their loggers use 1970s microcontroller 
technology), but they are good enough to produce bankable data for 
building $100M wind farms. You probably don't need this.

I've heard you can use the Davis system with Linux. Here's just one 
example: <http://www.joejaworski.com/weather/>.

cheers,
  Stewart
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