Weather Banter - FAO: Adrian Shaw

Felly sgrifennodd Gareth Slee :
I'm stll having email problems.

Oh dear - sorry I can't explain it. Email postmaster at my domain if you
still can't get through.

Maybe I can ask the question here...

Hi Adrian
I've been browsing your website and the Weather Station page intrigued
me. As I understand it you use a Lacrosse WS-3600? Do you know the
differences between the WS-3600 and the WS-2300? There's very little
between them price wise so any input would be helpful.
Secondly do you know of any graphing/reporting/publishing software that
would work on a PowerBook running OS X?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Well, the WS-3600 is pretty cheap, and it does a pretty good job. Accuracy
is questionable, particularly regarding wind speed. But I think the rain
gauge and temperature are fairly accurate. Obviously, the wind direction
is as accurate as my positioning of the gauge.

The WS-3600 is newer than the WS-2300. The base unit is a touch-screen
interface, whereas the WS-2300 has buttons on it. Otherwise I don't know
the difference either. They use different protocols for data transfer to
the PC, though.

LaCrosse only produce MS Windows software. Open3600 / Open2300 works on
Linux, and I believe Windows too. It would quite likely compile for
Mac OS X. You need a serial port though; do macs still have those? You
could try to compile it anyway, and if it seems to compile, it will
probably work with a weather station attached.

Open3600 has some basic graphing stuff in it I think. But I wrote my own. It's
not really in a state to give it away, and besides it requires other
software to be installed as well (such as gnuplot, perl, and a few other
things, as well as the open3600 program to get the data in the first place).
But if you're a bit of a programmer, I'd gladly send you my plot program
(written in Bash, requires gnuplot).

There is just one thing I need to use the LaCrosse MS Windows software for:
to change the interval for logging. I can't remember what the factory default
is, but I normally log every 10 minutes. Thus it will store up to 12 days
(1796 data points) of data in the base unit. But if I go away on holiday for
longer than 12 days, I need to set it to a longer period so as to keep a
complete record.

You can only do this with the software; there's no way to do this using
the base station alone. I think there are one or two other things you can
only set using the Windows software, but I never use them so I can't remember!

Adrian
--
Adrian Shaw ais@
Adran Cyfrifiadureg, Prifysgol Cymru, aber.
Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Cymru ac.
http://users.aber.ac.uk/ais/weather/ uk