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ajdesq
A Force-of-Nature *  
F-O-N Champion 2003
Member #: 6 Posts 214
Registered: 24-7-2002 Member Is Offline Mood: Living to kitesurf :-)
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| posted on 20-1-2008 at 23:25 |
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Installing a weather station - worth it?
I've read up with interest the history and goings-on with Al's weather station.
I've now moved to Camber (hurrah!) and live a seagull's fart from the beach. As there are no weather stations in Camber (that I know
of), and I now have a website where I'm trying to push my place for holiday lets, I was thinking of installing a weather station. A few
things put me off though:
For a decent wind reading I'd have to somehow secure a pole that will have to stretch about 10 metres above my terraced 3 storey
house
I'm pretty techno-phobic, and am not sure I could cope with all the coding, web hosting and stuff
I might be away for weeks at a time, and as I see by Al's experience, these things aren't exactly trouble and maintenance-free
I have very little spare time anyway, and it looks like Al has spent hundreds of hours working on his.
So the question is... in my case, would it really be worth it? Any opinions?
Cheers dudes,
Andrew
There's more to life than KITESURFING!
Let me know when you find it.
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justal
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| posted on 21-1-2008 at 08:58 |
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I think it is... If you go with the standard software and the standard website templates etc. then it doesn't take long at all to set
up, it should really just work straight out of the box... It took me a while because I had to hand code all of the pages to fit in with
the already existing Forces-of-Nature site and didn't want to simply display the standard pages that come with the software but wanted
the data arranged and displayed the way I wanted it. This meant getting each individual piece of data from the software into a text
file that I upload to the server every minute and then coding the pages to extract the relevant data from that.
That is just my perfectionist way though, most people just use the standard templates and don't have to deal with the coding and the
individual data packets etc..... Take a look at the weather-display software which is the one I use. It will generate web-pages for
you, or you can use their flash version which looks nice and is easy to set up.
As far as maintenance goes, then things do go wrong with the hardware, and it can get expensive repairing and replacing components, but
I think I've just been unlucky with the recent SIM board failure as I haven't heard of that happening to anyone else. Although I am now
on my 3rd temperature and humidity sensor already. The hard drive failure in the PC was just one of those things. It does take some
time to deal with such things and you do need to climb up the pole every now and then to clean and maintain it, but I think it is worth
it as I enjoy having the data to look at and it is good to see what the weather is doing and what it has been up to..
Al.
P.S. Today doesn't look like the day to be up the pole wiring up the new SIM board... I don't mind getting wet myself, but I doubt it
would do the electronics much good so it looks as though it will have to wait until tomorrow.
URL: Pixelwave Design - Website Design Wales
Shop: Website Templates
Personal Weblog: A Simple Life of Luxury in West Wales
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Cosmo
Member
Member #: 7308 Posts 3
Registered: 19-1-2008 Member Is Offline Mood:
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| posted on 27-1-2008 at 08:32 |
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I would download weather display as it is free for 30 days have a try to see if you can get some pages on your URL, have a mess around
with trying to ftp files and editing XML files, I would suggest using notepad++ for this. if you can get some sort of web page together
then spend some money on weather apparatus. A basic knowledge of HTML is a good start, plenty of tutorials on the net.
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Website Design in Wales, UK by  Pixelwave Web Design.
© Alan R Cole 2000... justal@forces-of-nature.co.uk
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