Geeky Weather Station Stuffs

http://weather.thegrebs.com/

I recently received a nice Honeywell weather station. It turns out they are actually manufactured by a company called Irox which also sells stations under it’s own name but they seem to be more popular in Europe. Being a geek, one of the first things I did was check out Linux or OS X support. Unfortunately only one piece of software supports this weather station under Linux, Weather Display. There Linux software is freeware but not open source and leaves quite a bit to be desired but at least it would talk to the weather station and collect data from it.

With a bit of Googling I found Saratoga Weather which seems to be based on a template from Carter Lakes. Unfortunately the PHP code is a bit of a mess with 43 separate php files all in a top level directory and including each other. With a bit of work I was able to bend it to my will but every little change was a pain to accomplish.

I started slowly re-implementing things in Perl. I found an online WD data-file parser which greatly helped in figuring out what the fields in Weather Displays native log files meant. Fast-forward a couple of weeks and I think things are pretty much done feature wise. I lack NWS warning/watch/advisory notification, the thermometer image with today’s information is still PHP generated, and I don’t yet have a wind graph. These last few details shouldn’t take too much work when I get around to it. I also have a few features the original lacks, graphs, a daily tweet with today’s high/low, and sane code :p.

The information from my weather station is available online at http://weather.thegrebs.com/ and the source is available via git clone from http://git.thegrebs.com/git/wxperl. You may also browse the repo via Git Web at http://git.thegrebs.com/?p=wxperl.