New wind/weather station near Coronation Beach, WA

Just a note to advise that I've just installed a new weather station that's now the closest wind and weather monitoring site to Coronation Beach Western Australia.

The station reports here:

http://www.kitesurfing.com.au/gerowind/

Here's a snip from today's rerport:






ABOUT THIS WEATHER STATION:This weather station is located at Drummond Cove, Western Australia, about 15km north of Geraldton and 15km south of Coronation Beach, one of the best windsurfing and kitesurfing spots in Australia.

There are two other wind stations in the region, but one is at the Airport, about 20km inland and more than 40km from Coronation. The other station is run by the Geraldton Port Authority and is located on the Red Channel Marker at Geraldton Port, so it's nearly 5km out to sea near town, and nearly 30 km from Coronation. Neither provide particularly useful information for kiting or windsurfing conditions at Coronation Beach.

The new station is located in a flat area on the north side of Drummonds, no obstructions on any side, with the sensors on a pole about 10m above ground (and sea level) and about 300m from the beach.

A FEW NOTES ON THE READINGS:Please ignore the rain data for now. When it gets really windy, the wind blows the rain sensor around inside its protective casing and it erroneously registers rainfall. You can be pretty much 100% certain if it's between about October and March, there'll be no rain falling in Geraldton. Apologies that the wind speed is in mph instead of knots, but if you want to do the conversions, 1 knot = 1.1508 mph.

BIG thanks to Jim Easterbrook in the UK for authoring and supporting the software that makes this all possible. LEGEND!

Cheers,

Rob

Why not contact Laurie and get it going on Seabreeze instead of other pointless sites?

Since posting this last week, I've had a few queries from folks interested in setting up their own station, so I thought I'd share the process that I went through, in the event that there are others who may also be interested.

I'll preface it with saying that prior to doing it I did have quite a number of lengthy email exchanges with Laurie about potentially posting the data as a Seabreeze location. Laurie's experience and insight was both very helpful and full of great practical experience that helped me enormously.

In the end, Laurie and I agreed that for a number of reasons, this site wouldn't be an appropriate Seabreeze feed, primarily because the equipment used is considerably different from what Laurie uses for the Seabreeze data collection/feeds and the hardware isn't nearly as robust nor reliable as the Seabreeze or BOM gear where Seabreeze gets its data. Laurie expressed concern with how often he'd be fielding queries if the station went offline, along with maintenance and support issues, etc. After this experience, I now clearly understand Laurie's concerns and understand his decision.

Having said all that and armed with this wealth of experience from Laurie I decided to have a go at it on my own with one of the primary objectives being to keep the cost as low as possible.

Laurie's Seabreeze weather stations are all professional units meant to survive extremes of weather without having to be replaced regularly. As a result, these units cost upwards of $1,000 once you'd put everything together to make it work.

The setup I've deployed has cost me out of pocket around $175, inclusive. But that's not the end of the story. More later.

If the outdoor component of this setup (sensors) survives two years in the brutal West Australian sun and the relentless Geraldton winds, I'll be happy.

What makes all this possible is a nifty Python/Linux routine written by a great bloke called Jim Easterbrook in the UK and the recent availability of the Raspberry Pi computer. But I'm getting ahead.

Previously, you needed a weather station, a dedicated computer (like a laptop), wires running from sensors to the weather station computer, Cumulus weather software, and all manner of other things that would occupy a bit of floorspace or deskspace in the area around the weather station.

Jim's routines have changed all that and now this little setup only requires a place to sit your weather station head-end display (about the size of your router) and the Raspberry Pi (the size of a deck of cards) in a location anywhere near your internet router. You'll then need an Internet connection to port the data out for display.

So, here's the parts list:

RaspberryPi: -- http://au.element14.com/jsp/bespoke/bespoke7.jsp?bespokepage=e14/common/promotions/rpi-accessories.jsp&ICID=ap-rpi-bplus-hwb-an

Weather Station: -- www.ebay.com.au/itm/Pro-Wireless-Weather-Station-w-Wind-Speed-Rain-Gauge-/280751578419?pt=AU_Gadgets&hash=item415e191d33

Weather Station software: -- www.weather.dragontail.co.uk/index.php?page=station_setup

Misc:
Rasp Pi housing
USB-USB cable – Weather station to RaspPi
LAN cable – Pi to Router
USB Power point with USB –USB micro cable
8GB SD memory card

Note that the weather station doesn't have to be this exact one linked above -- Jim's software can work with quite a few different ones as you'll learn in his Dragontail page. The one above is the one that I chose. There are many options. This one goes by many names and they're all pretty much the same. Maxkon 1080, 1081, Fine Offset 1080, Maplin 1080, etc. You'll find them for sale all over the place for around $120.

Before you go any further, a couple of pearls of wisdom for you that may save you a lot of hair-pulling and grief. I don't want to put anyone off who'd like to have a shot at doing this but you'll need some basic skills in certain things to be successful.

Firstly, you don't need to be a coder/programmer/computer scientist to do this, but you will need some basic skills in Linux, understanding of basic Linux commands and switches, some basic to intermediate TCP/IP skills and the ability to not be intimidated with working the Linux command line in a terminal window. FWIW, even though I know NOTHING about Python, I've managed to get my station working without having to do any appreciable Python programming or debugging. As they say "YMMV".

Because the Raspberry Pi is a fully-functioning computer you need to access it to load code, OS, etc. But it's really clunky having to plug a monitor, keyboard, mouse, LAN cable etc into this little box. So the solution is to use all this stuff initially to configure the initial environment, then, you set up an SSH access to the Pi by assigning a fixed IP address to it on your network. After this, all you need is a LAN cable to the router and some free software like PuTTy and you can unplug everything except for the power and LAN cables and do all the other configuration and troubleshooting from any machine on your network.

This project ended up taking a LOT more of my time than I anticipated. Even though I managed to get the sensors and the weather station set up and working straight away with no dramas, interfacing the weather station to the Pi and getting the Pi to send the data out to the web pages was a LOT of work, requiring probably a hundred hours of my time before I got to the stage of not having to be rebooting the Pi or resetting something several times a day to get it back on line.

It's now been running with 100% up-time for more than a week without blinking. Fingers crossed.

Jim is very helpful and hosts a Google Groups page where users can post questions but I did my best not to hassle him any more than I had to.

So, with all that in mind, have a go at it. I've learned a lot in the process and don't regret the exercise. But it was a lot of time invested to get it all up and going.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions, or if they're relevant to the Seabreeze audience, post them as replies to this.

I'll take some photos of the setup and post them later on.

Cheers,

Rob
www.kitesurfing.com.au

Great effort robbo , I just need to add 5knts for an accurate Dongara reading

Select to expand quote

Dave Whettingsteel said..
Well done Rob! So is current conditions on the left or the right of the graph? I'm guessing right but not obvious. A current numbers readout would be good too. I've got an Oregon weather station up at Horrocks, but haven't connected to the internet .. Yet. Reading how hard you found it doesn't aid my motivatIon! The Oregon supports a webcam too, but that would be even more annoying seeing the crew out at Horrocks when I'm at work haha.

Hey Dave -- yeah, current conditions are the right hand edge of the graphs -- it is a bit confusing -- I'm going to suggest to Jim that there be another Y-Axis label on the right side to make it easier to read. And yes, a set of dials with current reading is a great idea. I've seen it done elsewhere so can't be all that difficult to do.

The internet connection is not really all that complex -- you just have to have all the details of how to specify exactly where the data goes and every little item makes or breaks it. One issue that took me forever to work out was that when specifying the ftp address of the destination folder, if it had a space in the name, no matter what you did, it wouldn't work. But how would you know that unless you just tried removing it? Tough one to troubleshoot. I can also add a webcam but with all the dust and seaspray blowing about i simply don't have the time to be climbing on the roof 3X (or more) per week to clean the lens. Just not worth it. One of my neighbours is an electrician and video survelience installer and next product is going to be to put a web cam on top of the Drummond Cove Progress Association hall on the beach. So that'll mean I don't need to do it!

If you ever want any help getting yours online, feel free to contact me and I can share all the stuff I learned with you.