Webster Weather Dot Com

This is the project page for WebsterWeather.com, which contains description and configuration information of the hardware and software used, as well as a changelog.

Hardware

The brains behind the whole operation is a simple home-built PC; It's the beige PC tower box. The PC hosts the WebsterWeather.com website, communicates with the Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather console, Yaesu FT-2800M EchoLink radio, and shares the HP LaserJet 1020 printer to the LAN.

All hardware is running off of an APC Back-UPS ES 650, with some minor modifications to provide additional runtime in the event of a commercial power failure.

To the left is a messy and unflattering view of everything while I was  in town troubleshooting a communication issue between the weather console and PC. The weather console is on the left in front of the printer. The tower PC is in the cabinet, and the EchoLink radio is on top. To the right of that is the UPS sitting on top of an Astron 20 Amp 12 Volt power supply for the EchoLink radio. Hidden on the right side of the PC tower are the two 12 Amp hour batteries for the APC, Time Warner cable modem, and Buffalo Tech WHR-HP-G54 firewall/router.

And yes, I tried powering the radio with the 12 volt UPS batteries, which didn't make the APC especially happy. Even on low power transmit, the APC eventually passes a bad battery error due to the unexcpected voltage drop on the batteries.

Software

The operating system behind the scenes is Windows XP Home Edition, which was choosen for ease of configuration and Interoperability between the wide array of software used. If I could use a distribution of Linux, I would, but for now, Windows XP is stable enough for our needs. This is how we're running IIS on XP Home.

We use Ambient's Virtual Weather Station (VWS) to offload weather variables from the Davis Vantage Pro 2 (VP2) weather console. Time permitting, I will add a section here about Ambient Virtual Weather Station (VWS) configuration the custom Active Server Page (ASP) visual basic scripting that went into making WebsterWeather.com what it is.

We are currently experimenting with Ambient's Weather Exchange (WxEx) for fetching and parsing real-time weather alerts on the webpage.

EchoLink is installed, along with an addon, EchoProducer, which provides Text-to-Speech (TTS), used to announce real-time weather conditions, forecasts, and severe weather alerts to the greater Rochester, New York area via the K2RRA amateur radio repeater on 146.880 MHz. EchoProducer uses Weather Exchange to fetch weather alerts.

ChangeLog

2/15/2009

• Received a new VP2 ISS module last week; Put it inline (4-5pm); all sensors reporting OK.  Davis even sent it in a new housing, which was nice, once I figured out how to snap the housing out.  Installed new Energizer Lithium CR123.
  
  NOTE: It appears that Davis' super capacitor stock has changed (see white cap, right).  A quick search comes back with this, which is NessCap part ESHSR-0010C0-002R7, 2.7V 10F, which is idential to the old.  Hopefully NessCap's caps have have improved.
• Updated Virtual Weather Station (VWS) to v14.00 p64.
• The current barometer reading is being outputed via HTML template ("^vxv008^") .5 in/hg low, despite the software update.  All other display are correct, including via software, WeatherBug and WUnderground.  I set a + .5 offset in the ASP code until a less kludgy resolution is found.  Discussion is here.

2/1/2009

• Replaced the 3 volt CR123 battery in the ISS with an Energizer Lithium.  The previously installed Radio Shack (part 23-155) which was installed July 2008 was reading .98 volts; Not enough to power the ISS overnight when the solar panel couldn't provide juice.  The solar panel showed 2.1 volts on a cloudy February day in Rochester.
  
  The cause of the ISS power issue is a corroded capacitor (see the image to the right).  We're going to plead our case to Davis Instruments to get a refurbished ISS board (with new capacitor) since I don't feel like potentially kludging up a few hundreds of dollars of otherwise clean electronics with my poor soldering skills, and would rather not have the station offline for a few weeks while our capacitor is replaced.  Davis has always been top-notch in customer service, fingers crossed.
  
  Update 2/1/2008 @ 7p: Found a source for a similar ultra capacitor used in the VP2 ISS (10F 2.7V).  Depending on the outcome with Davis, I may just replace it myself.  A message board thread suggests that the new CR123 battery may only last a few days with a bad super cap.
  
  Update 2/2/2008: Davis is doing an advace swap of the VP2 ISS board... for $75.  But they cut us a break by picking up the shipping.  I was quoted $150 for a new VP2 ISS board.  Tough to swallow $75 for a $4 part that I could reasonably replace myself.  Oh yeah, the new ISS board only has a 90 day warranty.  I'm quite surprised that Davis isn't stepping up to the plate to swap out ISS boards with a component that fails with quite a bit of regularity.  Espeically considering I was recently able to send back two VP1 systems (console and ISS housings) for a complete rebuild for $75 each.

• Updated Virtual Weather Station (VWS) to v14.00 p57

• Updated router firmware to Tomato v1.23

1/28/2009

• Due to the hardware issues we're currently having, the current conditions will now revert to the official hourly observations from the Rochester International Airport if the conditions aren't available from our weather station in Webster.  A notice will be posted in the current conditions box when this is the case.  The cause of our issues are noted below.  Weather permitting, the battery will be replaced the weekend of 1/31/2009.  The next window for replacement won't be until the spring after the snow has cleared.

1/26/2009

• The console is displaying "Low Battery Station 1"... meaning that the PV (solar) panel is powering the weather station during sunny days, but the backup battery may not be enough to power things when the sun isn't out.  As soon as the roof is clear of snow, the backup battery will need to be replaced.  Maybe a larger battery system needs to be devised?

1/20/2009

• Fixed website issue where sunrise/sunset times weren't being recognized.  This is how we display different current condition icons based on the time of day.  Also, the content box backgrounds are brighter during the daytime.
  

12/19/2008

• Added "Heavy Traffic Mode" - It's just a routine to help ease the load on the webserver and webcam should there be a spike in traffic, like we're seeing with today's winter weather warning and predicted snowstorm.  During Heavy Traffic Mode, certain non-critical information isn't parsed/displayed, such as battery backup information.  Also, during non-high traffic times, the webcam image is updated every few seconds through a javascript refresh.  After about 20 concurrent users, the webcam starts to freak out and not serve images to anyone.  Once the webpage reaches 20 concurrent users, the webcam image that is displayed will be the image that is uploaded to WUndergroun.com, and will be updated once every two minutes (when the webpage is automatically reloaded).

• Changed the period of time that we consider a user to be "current" from 30 minutes to 15 minutes.  We've recieved over 2.5 million pageviews in the past four years, there's no need to pad our stats.  :)

• Lowered the webpage parse timeout from 15 seconds to 5 seconds.

• Installed Windows Updates

10/15/2008

• The damn 59 minutes after the hour bug in Virtual Weather Station (VWS) still exists, even after putting the Vantage Pro 2 on a "real" serial port, and away from anything having to do with USB. The Bits Per Second in Windows was set at 9600, which I bumped up to 19200. We'll see if that makes a difference. Other than that, I'm just about out of ideas.
• A car took out a uitility pole in Penfield last night, which brought the server down for a few hours. Runtime on the battery was about one hour, ten minutes, but email and SMS notification didn't get sent, even though the Internet remained up the entire time. Something else to troubleshoot.

10/12/2008

A fantastic fall weekend with perfect weather, bright sun, and no wind. The photo to the right shows the current state of the mast as of 10/13/2008: On the bottom is the 3-element beam for for the EchoLink node, the middle is the Davis Vantage Pro 2 Integrated Sensor Suite (ISS) for WebsterWeather.com, above that is the Davis anemometer, and at the top is a Diamond Discone D130J antenna for scanner receive. All feedlines are currently Tandy-grade RG-8. There is an additional wire that goes up to the ISS precip. cone to melt snow and ice.

• Updated WHR-HP-G54 firewall to Tomato firmware v1.21.
• Swapped COM1 (native onboard serial) and COM2 (Radio Shack Serial-to-USB adapter, part #26-183) due to a documented issue with Ambient Virtual Weather Station (VWS) loosing communication with the Vantage Pro 2 console 59 minutes after the hour when connected via USB. The Vantage Pro 2 console is now on COM1, RIGblaster PPT control is now on COM2.
• Added a Cushcraft A148-3S antenna and better feedline to the mast for better transmit and receive for signal to the K2RRA 146.880 MHz amateur radio repeater on Westfall Road for the EchoLink node.

7/3/2008

• Retired the old PII 400MHz desktop tower that was the WebsterWeather.com webserver since January, 2004. The new server is a home-build desktop tower, a P4 2.4GHz machine. The additional CPU cycles were needed for new functionality, mostly behind the scenes:
  • The Vantage Pro 2 (VP2) console is now connected directly to the server, opening up the possibility for up-to-the second weather updates (think JavaScript/AJAX-based updating).
  • WebsterWeather.com data is now available via radio frequency (RF) to the K2RRA 146.880 MHz amateur radio repeater in the Rochester, New York area. Detailed information on the Echolink page.
• Swapped out the factory 7 Amp Hour gel battery with two external 12 Amp Hour gel batteries for additional runtime during a commercial power failure. Detailed information on the UPS project page.