Brentford Gets New Weather Station

Posted by marko in Blog, Featured Articles, Gadgets, Life et al | 1 comment

OK, well the Met Office may not be beating a path, but as a hobbyist it seemed too good to pass up. I’ve always had a hankering for one of those weather stations you mount on the roof, which can plug into your computer and push onto the internet. It had to be relatively cheap, easy to assemble, wireless (not drilling holes in the wall), have a range of instruments, and be Mac compatible.

I thought that might be a bit of a struggle – ticking all those boxes, especially the Mac bit. However, I was pleasantly surprised with the unit that Maplin are selling as the “USB Wireless Weather Forecaster” (product code N96FY, £124). It has indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, pressure, wind direction and strength, and a rain gauge. I had a few days off work so I thought I’d give it a go.

Assembly was straightforward, a few screws and bolts and the thing went together. Because it’s wireless, the entire station can be easily lifted, moved around etc. I have an external ariel mount (which funnily holds a turnstile NOAA Weather satellite antenna). As I haven’t done any decoding in ages I decided to pop the antenna out and replace with the weather station. Making sure to align it north, this took about 15 minutes.

Finding software to support it on the Mac was a bit trickier. There is some PC software supplied with the unit, but reviews were universally awful. I settled on a programme called WeatherSnoop, which has wide station support and is a ‘proper’ Mac application. It’s a few minor bugs but pretty good value for the price.

This lets me poll the main station unit and display the data on the Mac. Creating an account on Weather Underground took 5 minutes – now I can automatically upload from WeatherSnoop to the internet. Finally, a free text/HTML widget allows me to embed my current conditions right here on my WP blog.

We’ll see how long the thing lasts, but as a 3 hour project it was good fun.

Marko

 

PS: The unit is doing the rounds in several guises – Ambient Weather WS-1080 is one of the more commonly found.

Related posts:

1. Ransacked Angel Demolished Station On warp in: 4 x Gistii Ambusher 1 x Gistum...
2. Ransacked Guristas Demolished Station On warp in: 1 x Pithum Inferno, 4 x Pithi...
3. Desperately Seeking A Signal… It’s probably a bit harsh describing an entire nation as...
4. Another asteroid buzzes Earth Newly-discovered asteroid 2011 CQ1 will make its closest approach to...
5. Augmented reality, take 2 Maybe my previous post re the Word Lens application wasn’t...