On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 11:39:13PM -0400, kmark@pipeline.com wrote: > On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Bill Moseley wrote: > > > Actually, there's two parts. First we need a machine to collect > > data from an inexpensive weather station and then copy (ftp/scp) the > > data to some location every so often. > > > > Any suggestions for weather stations (a piece of equipment, not an > > online "station") that a linux box can talk to? I assume a serial port > > is the interface of choice here. > > > > The second part is for a web site to fetch the data and convert it into > > some type of display suitable for a web page. It would be nice to have > > something graphic (even if it is static data -- could use some animated > > image to give the effect of the wind speed fluctuating, I suppose ;) > > > > Any ideas? > I recall from pop electronics or maybe the back of Linux (world,format...) > some ruggedized simple data logging devices (temp, Hg, vibration) with > serial intefaces that run on batteries? > I just did a google: Bingo! > www.picotech.com Do they support Linux now? Their ads look like they're still M$-only. They use a parallel port interface, so it might be rather awkward to figure out how to drive them. A dead-tree advert I have suggests http://www.ObservantWorld.com , who make a thing called a "Data Station" that gives you a bunch of analogue and digital inputs and outputs and is controlled via RS232. Or you could program a PIC microcontroller to do the job. These might be useful (if they still work - they're from a 3-years-dead tree): http://www.ibutton.com/TINI http://www.siteplayer.com (also given as http://www.SitePlayer.com ) http://www.eix.co.uk/Ethernet The last two are from an article by Eddy Insam in the October 2001 issue of Electronics World describing how he built a remarkably simple gadget enabling him to log onto his basement and read the temperature and switch lights and heaters on and off. The "SitePlayer" thing is a matchbox-sized module comprising a NIC chip and a microcontroller which runs a web server enabling you to read and write its I/O ports via a web page. It did unfortunately seem to be the case that you needed a Windoze application to download the HTML code to the SitePlayer module, but OTOH it uses an Ethernet interface so it should be fairly straightforward to use a packet sniffer to see what's going on. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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