Weather Station and Web Cam Information (17th March 2008).

Weather Station

The weather station that we have is a Rainwise Mk-III with integrated rain gauge (MK-III RTI Sensor Assembly.) The weather station is completely self contained, using lead-acid battery for power that is kept topped up from a built in solar panel. All you have to do when mounting the station on your roof is to make sure that the solar panel faces towards the sun. The specifications say that the station can run for 60 days without any sun (not a problem that we've had to deal with as we typically get a lot of sun.)

The station communicates wirelessly with a computer interface which hooks up via a serial port to a PC. The computer interface works well, the only issues being that it requires NiCAD batteries for its battery backup (these are hard to find these days - most rechargeable batteries sold in stores are NiMH) and the interface is a serial port rather than a USB (but serial to USB converters are widely available.) The computer interface comes with a copy of Weatherview32 and a copy of Virtual Weather Station Personal Edition. These programs are Windows-based. For comments about Mac-based software reefer to the next paragraph. Either of these pieces of software will allow you to look at the data from your weather station on your computer but you will have to upgrade them if you wish to send data to internet weather services such as Weather Underground. After installing and running both of them I was not impressed with either of them. I went with Virtual Weather Station as I felt it was the lesser of the two evils available. I had to upgrade the software to the Internet Edition so that I could gain access to the features that allow data to be uploaded to Weather Underground.

I found that the software would just die occasionally or the PC it was on would just lock up so I ended up putting the software on an old laptop which is on its own UPS/AC filter and is set to automatically reboot itself every 24 hours. The only issue I have faced with this set-up is that you must disable the logging on the Rainwise computer interface or every time the weather station software starts up it spends hours downloading all of the log history before starting to upload data to Weather Underground.

So, would I recommend this? Well, I hate the software that I am forced to use but the hardware is pretty good. When I looked at weather stations I thought the Rainwise solutions were the best out there for what I wanted to do and would definitely recommend it. This summer I intend to put together my own single board computer that I will use to interface with Weather Underground and get rid of the PC-based parts of the solution. Part of the reason for doing this is that I want a more reliable and low power solution than the PC + software one I now use. All I need is for the weather station results to be posted to Weather Underground and the current solution is overkill.

What would my ideal solution be? I would like to see a weather station that is built like the Rainwise one but is completely stand-alone. It would connect wirelessly to 802.11 and be able to be accessed using a web interface to set it up and then be able to send its own data to services such as Weather Underground. I understand that this would reduce the battery life somewhat (wireless 802.11 is power hungry) but it would be interesting to see what the real numbers would be. Maybe the solution would require a larger solar panel and a larger internal battery - are you listening Rainwise?

I recently tried my first Mac-based weather program. There is not a lot of choice out there for Apple-based weather software and even less when you look for software that will work with a Rainwise weather station. I am sad to report that the experience was awful. Typical Mac software is quite swoopy compared to Windows programs but Weather Display was dismal. It is every bit as clunky and ad-hoc as its Windows-based cousins and I couldn't get it to communicate with my weather station at all.

Web Cams

My main requirement for a web cam was that it had to be completely independent of all computers (I wish I could get a robust weather station that would work the same way.) I decided that the camera I need was in the class of what the industry calls network cameras.

The first one I bought was an Axis 206 (which is no longer made) and though I liked it I ended up selling it as soon as I heard that Axis were making a wireless version. The one I have now is a 207W, which is a decent camera but doesn't have very good low-light capabilities. If you'd like to look at its output it is set up as SlackerCam™ 2 and is can be viewed on Weather Underground or on our site. This camera's biggest advantage is its size - it's tiny considering what it can do. If you can place it somewhere looking out of a window where routing power is not too onerous then it is a great choice. The camera is just placed in a window looking west and I need to find a better place for it. the difficulty about this is that all of the "better places" would be difficult to route power to and so it might stay in the window for a while.

After my experience with the Axis camera I thought I'd like a camera that I could put outside in a dome and could be steered around. I found the Axis cameras with this capability to be a bit too pricey and decided to try out a Toshiba camera. The one I bought was an IK-WB11A (their current version of this camera is the IK-WB15A) and put it in a heated dome. It is a fabulous camera and is far more sensitive than the Axis 207W - better clarity and better low-light capabilities. If you don't mind splurging then this is the one for you. If you'd like to look at its output it is set up as SlackerCam™ 1 and can be viewed on Weather Underground or on our site. When we signed up to Weather Underground and saw the time-lapse sequences were being spoiled by visitors to our site panning the camera we switched this capability off. The one problem with this camera is that its CCD is dying (hence the rosy tint to it.) I think that this is because it faces into the sun (and has done for the last 3 years) and since it is designed to have good low-light ability it can't have much in the way of infra-red light filtering to protect the CCD. If you get one of these make sure that it is placed somewhere that doesn't receive direct incident sunlight. We don't have any good views that have this option so we have to live with the problem. Fortunately Toshiba will refurbish it for a reasonable price (about half the cost of a new one.)

The other issue that I have with these cameras is that I'd like to be able to send images on a timed basis (i.e. every few minutes) to Weather Underground and my FTP server. The Toshiba camera can do timed uploads but the Axis camera needed an external trigger built to initiate the transfers (it's a good job I'm an electronic engineer!) Both cameras only allow one FTP site transfer to be set up in their standard configuration pages. I think I can get around the problems on both cameras by writing some custom scripts but I haven't had the time to look into this yet. When I do I will update this page.

If you are interested in seeing the HTML code that drives these cameras you should click on one of our camera links and look at the source code of the page.

Anyway, I hope that this information helps people in their quest for a camera or a weather station. If you have any questions or comments about what I've written please contact us.