Sorry about this, but over the weekend a power surge / power cut appears to have killed the PC that runs the Borth & Ynyslas Weather Station.

I've tried fixing it but there's simply no life left in the machine. It whirrs briefly flashes a light and then fails miserably to get any further. This means that although the data-logger should still be logging the weather data at the moment I don't have a computer that can process the data and upload it to the Internet.

It doesn't need anything too powerful, just a windows PC, preferably with a serial port. However I don't have a spare one so will have to find the cash to buy one or beg/borrow/steal one from somewhere - I'm currently working on that. Once I've done that I shall have to try to recover the data from the dead PC (although I do have a back-up elsewhere) and then get the software installed, running and configured on the new machine. Not the best timing money-wise or time-wise with Christmas approaching but I'll see what I can do and will get it back up and running ASAP.

Needless to say though that the weather station isn't currently updating at the moment and may not be for a while. If you need to know what it's doing here and now, just send me an email and if I'm here I'll let you know!

Al.

Al, what kind of spec machine do you need? I might have an old XP machine (tower) (PentiumII ?) lying around at home (possibly another 8-10 year old machine in the corner of my office not sure what it is). Both almost certainly have serial ports though... If it is just data logging you are welcome to have them gratis if no solution found by then. I'm in Germany till thursday but can have a look and see what they are when I get back.

Neal.

Cheers Neal.

Spooker has offered a 5ish yr old PC as well. It doesn't need to be particularly powerful as almost anything should run the weather station software really.. Although something reliable, not too expensive to run and preferably not too noisy would be ideal as it has to sit in the office running 24/7. I guess whichever is the best out of the ones I get offered will become the weather stations new home... I've got plenty of old machines lying around here as well but they are all Macs!

Let me know what you've got when you get back from Germany.

Thanks,
Al.

Yeah, all my more recent machines have been Macs also mostly laptops because I switched to Macs when the Intel OSX ones came out (never looked back). So I think all my old machines are older than 5yrs - Spookers offer might be best, but I will let you know.

Neal.

Right, looks as if I'll have to throw yet more money at the weather station - About to spend £200 on a new PC, not a bad deal though for a Pentium Dual Core 3.2Ghz processor, 4GB RAM and a 1TB HD - More than enough power to run the weather station.

It'll take me a while to recover the data from my back ups and set up the weather station on the new computer - I had quite a bit of custom coding that I'd written and custom configuration set up so I'll have to try to remember how I did that as well.

I guess it'll keep me busy over Xmas, but at least it means that I have a plan to get the weather station back up and running soon.

Al.

Thanks for your patience with the recent Weather Station downtime. I have now bought a brand new PC and have now set it all up and have restored the data from the old weather station PC onto it. I'm now at the stage where the PC and weather station are once again communicating with each other and the PC is uploading data to the website every minute as before.

Everything should therefore be back up and running and you can once again see what the weather is doing at your favourite beach!

There may be a few things that'll take a few days to settle down as far as the various graphs and charts go but I'll keep an eye on it over the next few weeks to make sure all is updating as it should do.

Once again, thanks for your patience and your continued subscription to the weather station - the income from the subscription fees doesn't cover the cost of things such as a new computer but it does all help, so please continue to support the weather station and encourage others to do so too.

Many thanks and Merry Xmas,
Al.

Just a quick update to let you know that all seems well with the new weather station PC. After reinstalling everything and getting it all configured the way it should be I have left it up and running as usual and it has been updating the Weather Station pages every minute since... Since the last reboot it has received over half a million data packets from the weather station sensor suite and seems much more stable than the previous, very elderly, PC that it has replaced.

No doubt it'll crash now that I've posted this, but all seems fine so lets hope I can keep it running for another 7 years!

Al.