Friends, brethren, comrades. I've got a working wind speed/direction vane in working beta. I've designed it to look almost identical to Wunderground's rapid fire wind vane. This, of course, is customizable. You can make it look like whatever you'd like; colors, background colors, shadows, line thickness, size, pointer speed, radial ticks, radial numbers, etc. It's pretty much open. In mine, the live wind speed data value is always green, as opposed to Wunderground's where the value is black and changes to green upon a change in wind speed (I haven't quite figured out how to do that effectively, but I haven't really put my head around that yet).
A working model is on my webpage
http://www.gardenxingweather.info/home.html. I have LWC to upload data every 10 seconds. The .xml file is set to update (re-draw) the graphic at the same frequency. It's important to have the .xml file update *at least* at the frequency of the station.
This is a Flash app, folks. Those of us with iPads and who use them to access our pages won't be able to see the wind vane. Bummer (unless there's a workaround?). I'd be happy to work with HTML 5 in the future if there were some nice, easy tools to work with. But, in the meantime, Flash will have to do.
This was *extremely* tricky to code the php file correctly. The main reason being that the wind direction data from Lightsoft or Weathercat is a scalar value (position), for example, 185. But the Flash application needs to move the pointer with data telling it how many degrees to move, so the ['winddir'] value can't be used directly. This entailed having to store a "previous" wind direction scalar and saving it in a .txt file, and subtracting it from a "current" wind direction scalar value to yield a "degrees to move" data value. This was the big hurdle.
This uses Lightsoft's (or WC's) submit_weather.php file. I'm still using LWC and haven't upgraded to WC yet. I will shortly.
I've altered LWC's php file to output an .xml file instead of the .txt file that Stu designed it to. If you're currently using the .txt file for the live data output, you'd have to forego that functionality for this wind vane to work. However, you could use the .xml file to get the other live data you'd want and output it using Flash, if that was important to you.
Anyway, let me know what you all think. I'm happy to answer any questions.
I'll have the necessary files for you all to try in short order. Just smoothing some things out.
Matt