vendredi 28 avril 2017

Cumulus and WMR200 Oregon Scientific weather station

With the new PC installed, I am now running the weather station all the time. It is an Oregon Scientific WMR200 rather well equipped weather station but I find it highly unstable. I am running it with CUMULUS software which is basic but does the job.
Too many times hardware interface somehow disconnects and the software hangs up. I have been able to work around this by using a script which kill cumulus application every hour and reboot it; this is the script or batch (cumulstart.bat) which I include in the start menu/directory so it launches when Windows 10 boots up:
c:
cd \Cumulus
:loop
echo Before timeouttime /T
timeout /T 3500
echo After timeout
Taskkill /IM cumulus.exe /F
timeout /T 10
START C:\Cumulus\cumulus.exe
goto loop

Otherwise I am doing a web transfer every 15min of the weather data which is available as graphs on:


I changed a little the code for the main page to insert "inside" temperature & humidity (inside the control room where the weather station is located):

  <tr class="td_temperature_data">
    <th>Indoor Temperature</th>
    <td><#intemp>&nbsp;<#tempunit></td>
    <th>Indoor Relative Humidity</th>
    <td><#inhum> %</td>
  </tr>
  <tr class="td_temperature_data">
    <td>External Temp</td>
    <td><#temp>&nbsp;<#tempunit></td>
    <td>External Rel. Humidity</td>
    <td><#hum> %</td>
  </tr>
  <tr class="td_temperature_data">
    <td>Dew&nbsp;Point </td>
    <td><#dew>&nbsp;<#tempunit></td>
    <td></td>
    <td></td>
  </tr>



Here are couple of screens available on-line:






Snowing this april 28th

We got very late snow this year (but weather has been very cooperative so far). This morning around 5h30 snow was covering the garden, the dome and the chicken house...




dimanche 23 avril 2017

Maintenance

Some work beeing done at the observatory:

-new PC (with no mechanical hard drive) installed; much much better and I can leave it ON for long period of time now...

-weather station reinstalled and ok. I had to change the external sensors (Oregon WMR200 model, but spares won't be supported long - a shame!). Weather is now updated every 15min live on:




-LAN at ther observatory is now wired to the house but still use CPL between the box and the LAN line. Testing show a 50% downside in performance but I'm running around 4Mb/s DOWN and 1Mb/sec UP for the ethernet which is more than ok for my need. I should be able to run Astrometry.Net with better performance now...

-The new PC has four seriel ports so I got rid of the Serial/USB converter, much better for reliability as those things are not very reliable.


-outdoor varnish of the newly replaced door and complete southern side of the wooden house

-the Losmandy Titan mount requires a strong refurbishment, this is the next step (CR2032 battery replaced today).

-the garden has never been so cleaned up as I have some time to do it this year...

-two chicken now lives nearby... we got fresh eggs every day now! :-)