Category Archives: Gadgets

Weather in Fairport, NY

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DW3513 Southern Hills, Fairport, NY

This morning, I finished the installation of a wireless personal weather station at my house.

I ordered the Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 Plus Wireless station from Ambient Weather.

The package that I chose included a WIFI router from Hautespot Networks and it connects wirelessly to my home network and sends data from the weather console in the house to the Web without the need to connect to a computer. Since I use Apple MacBooks (ie: laptops), I didn’t want to run a PC to constantly act as a server and send data to the Internet.

In order to separate the wind unit and the main weather station, I added an extra wireless transmitter to the package so that I could separate the two and locate both of them in different places. I also added a heater unit so that the rain collection unit won’t freeze in the winter time.

The anemometer is on a mouting pole on the apex of the roof and captures wind speed and direction. The wind data is send via a solar powered unit that sends a 2.4GHz wireless signal to a console in the house every second.

The main collection unit, the main part of the weather station, is mounted on a fence post in my back yard . It collects information on humidity, temperature, rainfall, rainfall rate, UV, Solar radiation and barometric pressure. These data points are sent from another solar powered 2.4GHz transmitter every second to the house where it then meets up with the anemometer data in the display console for display in the den.

The display console hooks to the wireless router and that sends information through my broadband connection to the Web.

The sites receiving and displaying the data are WeatherUnderground, WeatherBug, HamWeather and the CWOP network.

CWOP stands for Citizen Weather Observer Program and certain weather stations can feed that network data to be used to help with weather research by private, public and government institutions. I was assigned a station ID of DW3513.

Data sent to the CWOP program is analyzed and compared with nearby stations and the expected predictions for the area where a PWS is stores. Here is the page that shows the results of station DW3515.

Finally, there is a cool map called the WunderMap and also a full-screen real-time page from WeatherUnderground that is pretty cool too.

Flickr photos of the mounting locations and devices are posted as well.

RadarScope was worth the price

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RadarScope from Base Velocity

RadarScope from Base Velocity

I paid $10 for RadarScope from Base Velocity for my iPhone via the Apple Store.

It is a very cool application, though I don’t understand all of the radars it accesses, but the basic radars are very useful. It has multiple detailed radar choices and the information is nearly real-time as far as I can tell when using it sailing and we see serious storm clouds brewing!

I’d say, “Yes”, RadarScope was worth the price and worthy of the “most expensive app I own” award.

What is the most expensive smartphone application you’ve purchased? What does it do? Do you think it was worth the price you paid?

Velocitek SC-1 and Mac OS X Leopard

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I managed to get the Velocitek SC-1 working on my MacBook Pro running OS X version 10.5.2 after a whole lot of effort!

Parallels 3.0 running Windows XP wouldn’t work. I tried for several hours.

I did get the Windows OS to see the units via the USB ports using Parallels and the Velocitek Control Panel software did see each of them too but the firmware update only ran to about 85% before throwing an error. Many attempts either didn’t start because of an error or it only made it to 5% before quitting. Most didn’t even attempt to start without the error message popping up.

Here’s what worked.

Today I installed VMWare Fusion for OS X and reinstalled Windows XP.

Everything went smoothly until I got to the point of doing the firmware updates. The control panel software started throwing errors and that was if it could even get started (again)!

I tried and tried everything I could think of and here is what worked:

  • Turn off the Velocitek Control Panel software
  • Unplug the SC-1 from the computer
  • Remove the batteries
  • Put the batteries back in
  • Plug the SC-1 back up to the computer
  • Start the control panel software
  • Run the firmware update

I did this twice with two units. Only in this specific order would the firmware upgrade work but I finally got it.

I was determined to make VMWare play nice with the SC-1′s and now I’m wondering if I just didn’t give Parallels enough trial and error effort.

Anyway… tonight, I used it to map my trip home from work (max speed was 32 knots).

Again though, when plugging in the unit, I had to remove the batteries, then put them back in before plugging in to the computer and starting the control panel software to download the track.

I’ll post again after the first use on the boat, possibly Saturday afternoon. I can’t wait!