My Davis Weather Stations
Current weather at Richards House is here The weather up on Pikes Peak is here
After using one wire weather stations for about seven years, the manufacture went out of business and no one else manufactured them. I had some spare parts of them, but I needed to start looking for something else.
I have been using a LaCrosse weather station at home, it works OK. The temperature, humidity, baromatric pressure, and rain guage all work pretty well, but the wind is very inaccurate. So I kept looking.
I looked closely at the Peet Bros weather station, but decided against it when I started reading the company had been bought out and it was not compatible with wview.
After looking for a couple of months I decided on a wired Davis 06152C (Vantage Pro cabled version) It was compatible with WVIEW and I could hook it up to a TNC if I wanted to transmit the weather data over a TNC. Along with a range of accessories.
The only drawback to the Davis is the cost, list price was $495, I was able to get one off of ebay (New old stock) for $270 delivered to my door.When the davis arrived, WOW! Its big. The rain guage is probably 8 inches in diameter. The wind guage feels a little flimsy, no sure how it will hold up, and hooking it up is pretty simply. Everything is well labeled and there is even an indicator LED on the junction box to let you know its getting a signal from the console. The console is rather impressive, it will give you a graph of any data element the last 24 hours of data. Example - wind, rain, temperature (inside and outside)
It also has a forecast button, which gives you a short text indicating the forecast for the next 24 hours, its reasonably accurate.One suprise I ran into with the Davis is the console cable to hook up to a computer. It has a expansion port on back, but you have to have the Davis console cable to plug into it. I was able to find an aftermarket cable from sloWEATHER. It plugs directly into the expansion port and the serial port of a computer. And costs a lot less then the $150+ Davis cable (The Davis cable does have a built in data logger though)
Another suprise I ran into when trying to rig up wview to the Davis was you have to change this option in wview:
STATION_RETRIEVE_ARCHIVE
By default, this is enabled in wview. The sloWEATHER console cable does not have a built in data logger, causing wview to not log any data in its archives (It took me almost a week to discover this)Installation
Here is my installation notes for wview on a centos 6.4 box:I created to install wview on a centos 6.4 box, its not perfect, you can almost copy/paste this script into an .sh script and it should install everything for you. After this, simply run wviewconfig to set the variables and you are good to go.