How it works
Cheylesmore Weather is based on a La Crosse ws2300 weather station, bought as a birthday present. A previous, somewhat basic weather station from Marks and Spencer sparked an interest in weather and soon I wanted a system I could hook up to a computer and record data from.
The ws2300 has an indoor control unit which interfaces to the computer via a serial port. The outdoor measuring instruments connect to an outdoor unit which links either via a wire or wirelessly back to the indoor unit. Additionally, the outdoor unit measures temperature and humidity.
The serial connection to the computer is read every 5 minutes by a cron job which uses a Perl module to get the data for each measured parameter. This data is then used to update an RRD database using another Perl module. The same module is used to drive RRDTool to create a graph of the current conditions.
Finally, the data is repackages into an RSS feed and Raw stats page. These were originally created to provide some data for a talk on Regular Expressions for Coventry Linux Users Group.
Needless to say, this all runs on Linux.
The next development is to have a webcam pointing at the sky to capture cloud patterns.
