Today is Mar 16, 2010

NollarWind Equipment

Weather Station

The weather station is a Davis Vantage Pro2, which is one of the the top-of-the-line personal weather station.  Station data is sampled every 2 ½ seconds, which provides a number of data packets that are recorded every 10 seconds. This data is summarized and uploaded every 5 minutes to this web site, the National Weather Service, NOAA, and several other private weather services.

The Vantage Pro2™ Wireless Weather Stations include four components:

  1. Integrated Sensor Suite (ISS) which houses and manages the external sensor array
  2. Console, which provides the user interface and data display
  3. Weather Envoy, which ia an interface between the ISS and the data logger
  4. Data logger, which is a serial interface between the Weather Envoy and the computer

The Vantage Pro2 ISS and Weather Envoy communicate via a FCC-certified 902 Mhz - 928 Mhz (license-free), frequency hopping spread spectrum technology transmitter and receiver. The wireless ISS is solar powered with a battery backup.

The sensor array includes:

  • Rain collector
  • Temperature sensor
  • Humidity sensor
  • Anemometer (wind direction and speed)

Computer Hardware

The computer hardware is a compilation of what has been laying around the basement.

The foundation is the following:

  • Intel Pentium 3 processor running at 500 Mhz
  • 768 MB ECC RAM
  • 120 GB PATA Hard Drive

Computer Software

All the software is freely available for download on the Internet as part of the Open Source Initiative under a variety of licensing agreements.  I am using "bleeding-edge" software on the weather server.  Some of it is in alpha or beta versions.

Software installed on the weather server includes:

Web Server

The web server is provided by JW NetSource, LLC.