Equipment

The equipment used at this site is a Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station. The sensor station is wireless and powered by solar power. This site is using the Weather Envoy to recieve data, with a separate console for display inside the house.

The reason I chose this particular weather station is because it has a data logger option. This means that if there is a software problem, then the data logger will continue to capture data. Even if power goes off, data will still be logged and then retrieved when power is restored.

Implementation

The very excellent wview software from www.wviewweather.com is being used to log data. The standard wview suite also generates web pages from a number of templates. In this case we have implemented an XML template that includes all weather variables provided by wview.

This XML file can then be parsed and we are using python to do that.

The site itself uses zope, which is python based. It is therefore fairly easy to implement a site that accesses the dynamic weather data that is updated in XML form by wview once per minute or so.

The site uses one of the free style sheet templates from capmex.biz. The idea to use this and create the current implementation came from looking at the weather site at carterlake.org