Trixology

General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Donn Rodekohr on September 29, 2017, 03:43:03 PM

Title: WeatherCat and a weather station network
Post by: Donn Rodekohr on September 29, 2017, 03:43:03 PM
We have a statewide network of about 12 Davis Vantage Pro Plus weather stations.  The devices are all connected to our network with WeatherLink IP and serve the data to CWOP.  However, our researchers and clients often times want more detailed information than is saved on CWOP.  For example, we have soil moisture/temperature probes and we also have the radiation sensors that are not addressed by CWOP.  Sometimes our researchers want a minute-by-minute dataset as well.

WeatherCat seemed to be the solution to our data distribution problem.  However, we want to handle all of our weather stations from a single computer and distribute the data through a website showing all of our weather stations.  It appears that WeatherCat will address only one weather station and will store all the data in one hardwired location.  If that is true than we need to find a different weather station monitoring package.

Can you confirm these limiations?  And if they are true, do you have some recommendations for software to monitor a weatherstation network?

Thank you.
Title: WeatherCat not designed for this task. (Re: Weather station network)
Post by: elagache on September 29, 2017, 11:24:45 PM
Dear Donn and WeatherCat forum members,

We have a statewide network of about 12 Davis Vantage Pro Plus weather stations.  The devices are all connected to our network with WeatherLink IP and serve the data to CWOP.  However, our researchers and clients often times want more detailed information than is saved on CWOP.  For example, we have soil moisture/temperature probes and we also have the radiation sensors that are not addressed by CWOP.  Sometimes our researchers want a minute-by-minute dataset as well.

WeatherCat seemed to be the solution to our data distribution problem.  However, we want to handle all of our weather stations from a single computer and distribute the data through a website showing all of our weather stations.  It appears that WeatherCat will address only one weather station and will store all the data in one hardwired location.  If that is true than we need to find a different weather station monitoring package.

Can you confirm these limiations? 

Unfortunately, WeatherCat is indeed designed to manage a single station and stores its data on the Macintosh running the software.  So it isn't a solution to your needs.  I'm not aware of any software that can collect data from more than one Weather Station and store it on a central server.  Perhaps you could contact Davis technical support.  If there is anyone who might know of such a solution, you would hope that Davis would.

Sincerely,

Edouard
Title: Re: WeatherCat and a weather station network
Post by: xairbusdriver on September 30, 2017, 03:37:14 PM
Since every station needs a computer running WC, why not create a database of the info on your web server? You can use just about any programming language to collect to data from the various databases and manipulate the combined info any way you want. I doubt you need the app to create any HTML and it is already collecting the data which you can tell it to upload. That's the general plan for all the templates I've looked at; the template simply grabs the data and displays as the designer wants. ;)

Of course, if you can get the Davis supplied app to do that, it will be cheaper to use than thier app and a cheap, headless Windows box.
Title: IT/DoItYourself
Post by: dfw_pilot on December 22, 2017, 12:09:15 AM
I second xAirbusDriver - Auburn University has to have some eager computer science majors just itching to write the code that would make it work, plus that would be more affordable than having an out-of-the-box solution.