Software
Website_Construction Weather_Monitor Webpage_Display
Website Construction
This Website is hosted by 000webhost.com It is a totally free service with no ads at all,they provide reasonable storage and a generous monthly bandwidth allowance. It took me 4 different providers before I found a site that really works. I highly recommend them. The website was developed on a home PC setup to act as a local server for a Web hosting site. I used Wampserver 2 which is a freeware package based on Apache server, PHP scripts and mySQL database.. The site was created using various bits and pieces of code scavenged from the Web. It was put together and tested using Dreamweaver. Those PHP scripts I wrote or modified myself were developed using phpEngin. Most of the graphics were cropped, resized and fiddled with using Corel Draw. My preferred browser is Firefox and uploads to the site handled using the fireFtp add-on. The webpage functionality is predominantly achieved through PHP scripting and a consistent look and feel across the pages is maintained by using a common stylesheet (CSS). The left side navigation functionality was provided by Max Navigation. SQL queries were built and tested using SQLBuilder for MySQL a freeware package.
Weather Monitor
The WS2300 weather monitor has a stand-alone control unit which stores limited history data. It connects to a PC via a serial connection. My new one-year-old PC doesn't have a serial port so I tried connect using a USB to serial device I had which us used to communicate with our security system. But it didn't work. Looking at the WS2300 serial communication specs refers to 4 wire comms and that some 2 wire USB bridges may not work. The USB device I have is a 2 wire unit. Time for Plan B, so I dusted off my previously retired six-year-old PC which has a serial port, install the OEM Heavy Weather software and I was in business. I run Tight VNC remote-control freeware on both PC's. That way I can sit at one PC and work on both PCs at the same time. I have two monitors running on the new PC, so I have the old PC running in a Tight VNC session on the left monitor and the web pages etc running on the right hand monitor. The old PC is just sitting there as a box with no monitor keyboard mouse etc attached. The Heavy Weather software does produce Webpage's. But they are all graphics and soak up a lot of bandwidth, especially if you want five-minute data updates.
Display of Weather Information on Webpage's
My ultimate goal is to use open source software that will extract data from the weather station control unit, upload it into a remote mySQL database and then php scripts on the website will query the database extracting information to produce charts and other graphics. The displayed graphics are only created whenever the webpage is opened or refreshed, this is all done on the remote server and so the only bandwidth required is the regular provision of database updates which will occur every five minutes. This will only take 0.2mb bandwidth a day compared with 2.3mb a day when you are serving graphics from the home PC to the remote server. Most of the webpage graphics will come from wxgraph or weathergraphs and open source WS2300 php graphing package.
The current implemented solution use Weather Display software which is a great package that is infinitely more configurable than Heavy Weather. It works on a wide range of instruments and has a large forum providing good user support. It supports uploading of graphics, data, mySQL and can ftp data to a number of different servers, as well as email and so on. It will also hook into and provide data for the dedicated weather networks like Weather Underground
The PDA data page was designed to fit on a 180*120 pixel screen (a Palm pilot or an older blackberry). It is a simple php generated table summarising data over the last 24 hours.
Like most development exercises, the majority of my time was spent chasing down various configurations errors, learning syntax, chasing bugs and probably less than 10% of time was spent productively coding. The vast majority of my previous programming has been done using Visual Basic 6 or VBA macros. Visual Basic is very tolerant with regards to syntax and is not fussed about how many spaces you might add, upper and lower case and other layout requirements. Php on the other hand is particularly anal about syntax, I spent hours trying to chase down why one particular script wouldn't work, to eventually find that when I changed one letter in a file name from lower to uppercase so we exactly matched the file listing the script worked.
I could write pages and pages of tips and tricks I have learned along the way (and sadly will soon forget) but it is all out there on the Web, you just have to look long and hard and not take the first bit of information you find as being correct every time. As Mulder would say "the truth is out there"