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Ready to measure!
By frackers, Section Diaries Posted on Sun Mar 23rd, 2008 at 09:51:24 AM MST
Measuring the wind

After 4 years of using a cheap LaCrosse wireless weather station I've at last got round to modding it to update more regularly (with solar charging on the batteries to compensate for the increased power consumption) and to connecting it to my PC.
Now I can see all the details at a glance, and see what happened when, by just going here.
The mill (hopefully) goes up tomorrow for its first trial run and in the next few weeks I'll get monitoring on that as well so I can track power into the batteries and power out (very important with really rough old truck batteries I think!).
Some impressive pictures of yet another 10 footer soon (I hope) but in the meantime there is aways my website where I'm documenting my progress in pictures.

Ready to measure! | 6 comments (6 topical, 0 editorial)

Re: Ready to measure! (3.00 / 0) (#1)
by frackers (g8ecj at *nospam* gilks dot org) on Sun Mar 23rd, 2008 at 04:28:24 AM MST
(User Info) http://www.gilks.org

The weather graphs might be more useful at this URL as you can change the viewpoint (not so important yet as I only have 24hrs data collected so far!)

Robin - Down Under (or are you Up Over)

Re: Ready to measure! (3.00 / 0) (#2)
by rossw on Thu Mar 27th, 2008 at 02:58:00 PM MST
(User Info) http://house.albury.net.au/

Looks like you've got access to the raw data from the weather station. Thats a bonus!

You might like to have a quick look at http://weather.albury.net.au/ particularly with reference to presentation of wind data.

I too used to have the seperate graph for speed and direction, but find the new presentation much more intuitive and gives me a much better "feel" for wind character at a glance.

R.

[ Parent ]

Re: Ready to measure! (3.00 / 0) (#3)
by frackers (g8ecj at *nospam* gilks dot org) on Fri Mar 28th, 2008 at 05:44:33 AM MST
(User Info) http://www.gilks.org

I like that a lot!! Sure I've seen it before (either on your site or somewhere else recently). Question is, how do I do it!

I'm running a Linux box with apache/php/perl/mysql - the usual lamp stuff in fact. All the weather stuff is using the rrdtools package with the cacti wrapper and the raw data comes from a LaCrosse 2310 weather station so I can massage it in many ways even if I can't integrate that particular display into the cacti stuff (but I could put it into the static exported page)

All donations of (GPL) code gratefully received :-)
Robin - Down Under (or are you Up Over)
[ Parent ]

Re: Ready to measure! (3.00 / 0) (#4)
by rossw on Fri Mar 28th, 2008 at 01:28:23 PM MST
(User Info) http://house.albury.net.au/

Ahh, thats excellent.

I'm a FreeBSD man myself, but I'm sure that without too much tinkering you can get my code working on your system.

Do you have gd installed? If not, grab it and install it and give me a whistle. My code uses gd to actually create the image.

Basically all I do is take raw wind samples (in my case, every 5 seconds), take the direction to calculate the start and end of the arc, and the speed to make the radius.

Perhaps the hardest part is the time calculations, I scale over 1, 4 or 24 hours so the colour scale smoothly transitions over the period. Depending on where the current sample is in the time domain determines what colour I draw the arc.

Draw the scales, plonk some labels, write the output, done.

Are you comfortable coding in C? Can send you source. Possible I could link it static and send you executable? Not sure on that one!

R.

[ Parent ]

Re: Ready to measure! (3.00 / 0) (#5)
by frackers (g8ecj at *nospam* gilks dot org) on Fri Mar 28th, 2008 at 09:49:50 PM MST
(User Info) http://www.gilks.org

I'm quite comfortable coding in C - it has paid the mortgage for the last 20 years after all - so the source would be great. I already have gd-2.0.35 installed (on checking I see that Gallery, php and graphviz have dependancies on it).

As if I didn't have enough to do...
Robin - Down Under (or are you Up Over)
[ Parent ]

Re: Ready to measure! (3.00 / 0) (#6)
by rossw on Fri Mar 28th, 2008 at 10:22:29 PM MST
(User Info) http://house.albury.net.au/

Check your e-mail.

I've sent you the source of my code, along with some sample shell scripts to show you how I use it, and a snippet of my raw log so you know what it's expecting!

The code is for your own, non-commercial use only, thankyou.

[ Parent ]

Ready to measure! | 6 comments (6 topical, 0 editorial)

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