weather underground

I took a bit of time to re-do the weather station configuration. I had obtained an EeePC 900A on the very cheap a little while ago and had been using Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it to host the wx200d daemon for my Oregon Scientific, piece of junk, wireless station. The 900A is a woefully underpowered system for a workstation, but the low-power consumption, built-in "console" and decent specs (for a lightweight server) makes it attractive for home tinkering.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix turned out not to be a good choice (took up far too much RAM and disk space) so I wiped it and went with Ubuntu Server (9.10). I had been using some custom code that orchestrated ploticus for graphs, but - as I was already sending data to sites like Weather Underground - I decided to just utilize their feeds and some keen Drupal integration for my own site.

The main weather site now uses the data graphs from the Weather Underground and the new weather block on RDN is a handy Drupal module that also connects to the Weather Underground for the readings (which makes the block [below] and the rapid-fire page).

If you had not already noticed, the weather cam (an old D-LINK DCS-900W) has snaps in thumbnail form on RDN and in larger form on the weather site. Weather Underground siphons the images off and makes handy time-lapse videos of the changes (they only approved it today, so no good stuff if you're seeing this on 2010-02-16).  Continue reading »