Hello,

My name is Grant, and you've stumbled across my weather recording site. i am a married father of 3 wee girls, and at present i'm studying towards my BSc in Computer science at Canterbury University. 

I used to design PCB's and be a general hardware technician at 4D Electronics LTD, and still do the odd bits and peices for them during the holidays at university. If you want a product designed, and designed well - these are the guys you want to see.

Very much like the one that Jeff has over at http://weather.northcott.co.nz 

Originally i was going to do this the hard way by,
* Building the weather station
* Making a micro controller/processor collect and send all the results to a receiver
* Make a script / program to read all that data in
* Make a weather page to display all of this on.

but delving into this i realise that this was a lot more work than i had really planned on ever doing. One day i might still make my own, but at the moment i'm quite happy with the current set up. 

So i bought the Jaycar weather station that is a re-badged Fine weather offset weather station. You can purchase it from Jaycar Electronics or a few other people. The link to there one is here. Although that particular one has UV measurement, whereas mine doesn't.

How does this work?

The indoor touch screen reciever has a USB host port on it so that it can plug into a PC. I have an *OLD* laptop that someone gave me connected to the screen via the USB, instead now i have a raspberry pi connected. This has the advatange of wasting a lot less power.

This machine runs a small program that i found called "wwsr", this runs every 10 mins to query the screen for new information. The weather station itself actually collects info every 5 mins, but 10 mins is plenty i think. 

This was originally written by the FOWSR, and some others. It didn't work as expected in the first attempt, I think the biggest fault was that it didn't get the correct rain values, so i re-wrote bits of it commenting it as i went so that i knew exactly what was going on, more or less really learning how it operated. My C Skills back then werent great so i wanted something to challenge me a little bit more.
I then added a postgresql add-on for it, so that i could either run it so that it would print out to the screen the variables, or by default would just write to the database the results it got.

More about me

If you want to see the code in all its glory, then you can head over to my github account where i store all my open source kinda stuff.

I do now have a blog where i rave and rant occasionally. I use it as a bit of a study tool as well posting code to help me learn or other little bits of information. 

Thanks for visiting - and please come back again soon!