Under the weather

Starting this weekend, I've ticked off another item on my weather station TODO list: I've started to submit data to Weather Underground. This means that my station has a page over there and you can also see it on the map of stations in my area.

Because I'm using Open3600 to pull data from the station I didn't have a tool to hand to do the submission (there is a tool that's part of the package — apparently inherited from Open2300 but it doesn't compile and seems to need a fair bit of work) so I decided to write my own submission program. I went looking for documentation but couldn't find any. However, there seems to be enough scripts around on the net to do this sort of thing that it was easy to see how WU accept the data — you simply supply it via an easy-to-construct URL. Half an hour of hacking away in ruby and I had a working tool.

I've set things up so that data is submitted once every five minutes — I figure that this strikes a nice balance between producing too much data and not producing enough.

The only outstanding jobs now are to see about constructing the shelter for the thermometer (which, I hope, will cure the temperature spikes I get when sunlight falls on it) and to find a better location for the rain bucket (it's currently in a bit of a rain shadow).

File Under: Weather Underground, Open3600, Open2300, ruby, Personal Weather Station.