Details

The beginning

Since 2003 I run a weather station in Koblenz Lay/Germany. At first this was a WS2500 weather station manufactured by ELV. To run the station I wrote my ws2500 software that allowed me to extract data from the station, insert it into a MYSQL database and finally present these data graphically in a web page.

Meanwhile, this station is no longer manufactured and no longer sold by ELV. Therefore, a new acquisition was inevitable. The choice finally taken was a Davis Vantage Pro 2 station.

The restart

After purchasing the Davis Vantage Pro 2 the question was of course how to extract data from this station and how to avoid a break in the display of old and new weather data. After all, there was already old data of about 8 years from my old ws2500 station.  This data should of course remain intact and accessible. In addition visualizing weather data should  be seamlessly, they should be no visible transition betwenn the old ws2500 based data and the new data coming from the Davis station. 

Preserving the old data

The solution I implemented is based upon wview a software that supports a broad range of weather stations. wview stores its weather data in a sqlite3 database and creates mostly static webpages from these data. A problem using only wview  would have been that my old ws2500 data would have been unusable.

So I thought about marrying wview with my wetter-MYSL database so that I can go on using wetter.cgi that dynamically creates web pages with the data the user wants to see.  To get this working I had to write some code that reads "new" data from wviews sqlite3 database, converts the data from imperial into the metric system and finally writes these data into my wetter-MYSQL database. The advantage of this procedure is that I have the old ws2500 data as well as all new weather data in one database that I can visualize using wetter.cgi.

This solution makes it very easy for all users running my ws2500 software to switch to a new station. You won't loose any data and it quite simple to integrate the new station. Even for folks that have not yet been using my wetter.cgi script to visualize weather data have now the option to add another visualisation system to there data if they agree to manage these data using  wview and my scripts.

State of the project

The projects software is already fully functional for a Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station. You will find a README in the downloadable software package that describes what you have to do in order to get things working. As a base you need a working linux system as well as a working wview installation.

At the moment my software support a Davis Vantage Pro 2 Station. I should work just the same with other wview compatible stations, but I have no other station I could test.

For a davis VP2 the software supports:

Not yest supported are:

The reason that there are unsupported sensors is, that I do not own these sensors and so I so not exactly know what data they deliver. Basically it should not be a big problem to integrate new sensors in the future.

Download

You can download the software using the URL below:

http://userpages.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/ftp/unix/wview2wettercgi/

Please support the development of this project with a donation of your choice.

{nicedonate:||Software:wview2wettercgi|Rainer Krienke. Vielen Dank}

The software is free. If you like it and use it regularly then please support further development. Thank you very much for your help. If you have problems using the software please contact me using the contact link of this web page.

Rainer Krienke