A new lease of life for the Weather Station

Death of a PC

Unfortunately, while we were away a few weeks ago the PC that runs the Borth & Ynyslas Weather Station died. It had been on its last legs for a few months anyway and had been constantly crashing, seemingly unable to cope with the demands of running 24/7, 365 days a year. It appears as though a power cut / surge whilst we were away was the final nail in the coffin. I could get power to it, but after trying to switch it on a few times all it could muster were one or two little clicks and whirrs and then it would give up.

Out with the old, in with the old

There was nothing for it but to buy a new computer. Not something I was looking forward to as the expense is one thing, but then there is all the set up and configuration of Windows and on top of that all the headache of getting the old Weather Station software working on the new machine along with tonnes of set up and configuration associated with the weather station itself – If you’ve ever seen any of the configuration pages within Weather Display you’ll know what I mean as it is a crazy piece of software with more features and options than you could ever imagine.

Fortunately I had a very recent backup of the Weather Display software and data so I shouldn’t lose too much. I’ve tested the back -up on Windows 7 as well and it seems to work OK. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll stick with the old (6 year old) version of Weather Display that I’ve got and use that or update it to the latest version. The software gets updated almost daily though so keeping up is next to impossible. The new version will of course have plenty of new features, but the one I have does everything I need it to and has been working perfectly for the past 6 years so maybe it’ll be easier to just stick with that.

Hardware

The new PC is now here – I don’t need much to run the Weather Station, but it did need a serial port for the connection. I managed to buy a desktop with a 3.2Ghz Dual Core Pentium processor, 4GB RAM, a 1TB hard drive and a serial port for £199. Much more power than I need, but that’s the basic model these days. A little crawling around under the desk and the machine was in place with all its cables connected. Unfortunately after a few weeks without a PC running in my office and just my super-silent Mac running the fan in the new PC sounds pretty loud… I may have to buy a more efficient, quieter fan for it as the noise will drive me mad. But other than that it should be more than up to the task.

Configuration

Now comes the fun of installing Windows, getting it all up to date and then trying to set up the weather station software. As well as getting the Weather Display software up and running I need to make sure it connects OK to the Weather Station console and then manually input all of the weather extremes from the past 6 years as these don’t seem to be stored in the backups – for some reason they are stored in the registry so I can’t get hold of them as the old computer won’t start up.

Once I’ve done all of that, I need to configure the software to talk to my website so that it can upload the weather data to it every minute. That should just be a matter of configuring the FTP connection within the software and setting up the upload frequency of the numerous files…. What could possibly go wrong?

Windows Install

Being the impatient type I started the machine up as soon as I could and got down to work installing Windows 7. I fell at the first hurdle though as my Product Key wasn’t recognised… That is being sorted with the vendor and I ploughed on regardless, leaving the product key for later… I just hope that I can still activate this copy of it and don’t have to reinstall when I get a copy with a working product key.

Next was obligatory Windows Update dance… Run Windows Update, Restart, Run Windows Update, Restart etc etc etc. I also installed Microsoft Security Essentials and the latest copies of various browsers at the same time. It takes a while to do all of this. More than 90 updates, along with a slow and intermittent  Internet connection don’t help. But, at least it means everything is up to date. That noisy fan is still driving me nuts though – what is it trying to do down there – take off?

Weather Display

Next it was time to install the Weather Display software. Fortunately, being a diligent computer user, I had made a backup of the software and its data the day before we went away. So, reinstalling it was a simple case of putting this onto a pen drive and then copying the application and its data across to the new computer. Once that was done, Weather Display started up and I was able to start ploughing my way through the maze of configuration screens within it.

First problem was getting the new PC to communicate with the Weather Station Console through the serial port. This took a while but I eventually managed to sort it out by changing the Baud Rate of the COM port from within the Device manager on the PC. At last, the PC was downloading data from the Weather Station again.

All I had to do now was manually input the record temperatures and other extremes as I have yet to find a way of copying these across from the old machine, and then manually configure the FTP settings and file creation and upload times so that the correct data gets to the web at the right times of day. There seems to be several places to enter this data within Weather Display and it took me a while to find them all. This took  a while and involved a little bit of trial and error but I think I’ve done it all now.

A few other tweaks to make things look the way I wanted it to and an update of my latitude and longitude settings within Weather Display so that the moon and sun data is correct and I think I’ve done it.

Back Online

The Weather Station is once again online and updating every minute with the latest weather conditions from Borth and Ynyslas. Most of the graphs and charts have been updated online as well, although a few of them will take a day or two to make their way to the website. I’ll need to keep an eye on things as certain files for the historical weather data only get uploaded one a day or once a month so I may have missed a few but hopefully I’ll get it all back working as it should before too long.

Now all I have to do is network the PC with my Mac so that I can do periodic, automatic backups of the weather data to my Mac and maybe find some way to stop the PC from being so noisy!

Phew!

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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