Category Archives: weather

New battery

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I changed the battery in the weather station, because in cold weather it was reporting low and we really don’t want to lose any data.

Unfortunately, it picks a random station ID on restart! My display software selects one station ID to display (in case there are other weather stations nearby – the base station does the same thing). That turns out to be a bad idea if you want to see the historical data! I’ll need to enhance my code to display data from two station IDs, and do something clever with the rainfall (which has reset to zero).

Edit: Whew, fixed it. Bit of a horrid hack – I’ve hardcoded the old station ID and pre-battery-change rainfall, and arranged that it “corrects” the recent data. All-time rainfall is still wrong, but I’ll sort that another day – it’s bedtime!

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For future reference, I’ve attached the weather station manual (thanks Maplin!).

Weather station manual N25FR (WH1050)

The Guilty Spider

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Here’s the spider that had taken up residence inside our rain gauge. I’m sure it’s spacious dry and out of the wind, but when it spins its web across the triangular tipping bucket it has unfortunate effects on its accuracy. Sadly for the spider, the big people who live here don’t like that, so it now has to find another home.

This is a job I have to repeat every few months.

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The spider is the black creature under the left side of the bucket.

Weather station now live!

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I’ve been enjoying the weather page and graphs I put together for a few months now, and I’ve been steadily adding features. So I guess it’s about time I opened it up for everyone else to see too! So here it is: Wallace Brae Weather.

The current observations are at the top: temperature, relative humidity, wind speed (average and gust). This is followed by recent rainfall. Finally, we have the extrema: low and high temperature and highest wind speed over the last day. Then there is the time of the last observation – use this to check the system is still live.

Below this are the graphs: one for the last 24 hours, and one for the last week. Blue is rain (area corresponds to rainfall, and height to rain rate), red is temperature, yellow is humidity, and green is wind speed (dark is average, light is gust). I’m working on the best way to present the scale for the Y axis; for now you’ll have to work it out. The grey horizontal lines mark key points (e.g., 0 and 10 degrees C).

You can read about where it came from and how it works on the weather category on this blog – I haven’t posted much yet, but hopefully there will be more soon.

Enjoy! And do let me know if you like it!

The nearest other weather station I know of is the Polmont weather page, a bit over a mile north-east of here, down the hill.

SDR and weather stations

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I’ve been having fun recently learning about software defined radio (SDR). The impetus is this weather station, which Aidan got for Christmas.
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We’ve all very much enjoyed the information it provides, and it’s been a great talking point with the receiver on the family dining table.
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But when we’re at work or on holiday, wouldn’t it be nice to know what the weather’s like back home? Is it raining? Has the fence blown over? For that reason, in May I bought one of these:

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NooElec R820T SDR

The mast transmits the weather data to the display by radio in the 433 MHz band. This NooElec NESDR Mini is a software-controlled digital radio receiver which covers 25MHz to 1750MHz. So it should work!
Since I got it, I’ve been busy learning how to make it go. This has turned out to be more complex than I realised – I finally got it all working in October! – so expect a series of follow-up blog posts.