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My home brew system

For discussion of DIY weather equipment - sensors, accessories, improvements to existing kit etc
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lloydh
Posts: 9
Joined: Sat 29 Oct 2016 8:55 pm
Weather Station: Home made
Operating System: Centos 7
Location: Brisbane, Australia

My home brew system

Post by lloydh »

A little about myself. I am 72 and retired from a lifetime working in Electronics and IT, I enjoyed my work and it was also my hobby but my world came crashing down in 2005 when I had a work related breakdown that did a lot of damage and left me on a disability pension. After that things got a lot worse for me with major health and financial issues and I came very close to not making it through all that.

After my breakdown I completely turned my back on everything technical, I just became a user of computers until the early part of 2016 when I started to feel like I wanted to dabble in electronics again so I took it gently, wrote a little software and did a couple of projects which started to make me feel good about that as a hobby again. It was difficult getting back into things, the breakdown left a lot of empty areas in my head and a lot of what I used to know is no longer there and my short term memory is almost non existent as well as the industry changing a lot in the 11 years I was away from it. I kept looking for a project that involved hardware and software that would keep me occupied for a long time, a friend suggested a weather station but I didn't really want one but in one of my searches on an entirely unrelated subject I stumbled across the SteelSeries gauges, I thought they were the bees knees so a weatherstation it is.

I've never had anything to do with weather stations so a big learning curve for me, I made a number of early mistakes not realising how sensitive the sensors are because of the environment around them but I am a bit wiser now. The project is nowhere near complete, I have the temperature/humidity/pressure working outside and inside plus rain is also working since the end of July. I have just received my Davis 6410 wind instruments and I am currently working on that. Still to do are UV Radiation, Solar Radiation and monitoring of the household power.

I know my web pages are very ordinary, HTML was never a strong subject with me and now there is CSS as well, I will look at tidying up the web pages when I finish everything else. I haven't set out to build a station with a high precision of accuracy even though I try to achieve close to that, the main purpose for this whole project is to give my brain plenty of exercise because, at my age, you start to worry about dementure.
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PaulMy
Posts: 3776
Joined: Sun 28 Sep 2008 11:54 pm
Weather Station: Davis VP2 Plus 24-Hour FARS
Operating System: Windows8 and Windows10
Location: Komoka, ON Canada
Contact:

Re: My home brew system

Post by PaulMy »

Hi Lloyd, you've made great progress... and looks good :clap:

I am on the other side of the globe from you, but do have a son and twin grandsons who now live in Brisbane. Who knows, maybe we'll meet some day...

Enjoy,
Paul
Davis Vantage Pro2+
C1 www.komokaweather.com/komokaweather-ca
MX www.komokaweather.com/cumulusmx/index.htm /index.html /index.php
MX www.komokaweather.com/cumulusmxwll/index.htm /index.html /index.php
MX www. komokaweather.com/cumulusmx4/index.htm

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User avatar
mcrossley
Posts: 12694
Joined: Thu 07 Jan 2010 9:44 pm
Weather Station: Davis VP2/WLL
Operating System: Bullseye Lite rPi
Location: Wilmslow, Cheshire, UK
Contact:

Re: My home brew system

Post by mcrossley »

A great start Lloyd, and I'm glad you were inspired by the gauges to get started. Are you going to put a page up about the weather station itself?
perl
Posts: 52
Joined: Wed 24 Jun 2015 7:02 pm
Weather Station: Davis Vantage Pro2
Operating System: Buster Lite rPi
Location: Taasinge, Denmark
Contact:

Re: My home brew system

Post by perl »

Hi lloydh

fine work - but I can see you currently stealing quite a lot of heat from us here on the northern part of the globe :(

greetings
from Denmark
User avatar
lloydh
Posts: 9
Joined: Sat 29 Oct 2016 8:55 pm
Weather Station: Home made
Operating System: Centos 7
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Re: My home brew system

Post by lloydh »

I am on the other side of the globe from you, but do have a son and twin grandsons who now live in Brisbane. Who knows, maybe we'll meet some day...
I know that feeling of distance, my son lives in the U.K. in South Wales.
A great start Lloyd, and I'm glad you were inspired by the gauges to get started. Are you going to put a page up about the weather station itself?
Thanks Mark, there is an About page on the top menu on the right, you may have to scroll across to see it.
fine work - but I can see you currently stealing quite a lot of heat from us here on the northern part of the globe :(
I'd gladly ship it to you if I knew how, I don't mind the heat so much but when it is hot and very humid I hate it, I just sweat all the time.
User avatar
mcrossley
Posts: 12694
Joined: Thu 07 Jan 2010 9:44 pm
Weather Station: Davis VP2/WLL
Operating System: Bullseye Lite rPi
Location: Wilmslow, Cheshire, UK
Contact:

Re: My home brew system

Post by mcrossley »

lloydh wrote:
A great start Lloyd, and I'm glad you were inspired by the gauges to get started. Are you going to put a page up about the weather station itself?
Thanks Mark, there is an About page on the top menu on the right, you may have to scroll across to see it.
Ah, yes I missed that, thanks.
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radilly
Posts: 123
Joined: Fri 17 Jul 2015 11:01 am
Weather Station: Ambient WS-2080
Operating System: Raspberry Pi 3, OS Buster Lite
Location: McMurray, PA, US
Contact:

Re: My home brew system

Post by radilly »

Hi Lloyd-
I'm approaching, or maybe in retirement and I see in this sort of tinkering a way to keep the brain working a little. For my part, the loss of technical skill is more the result of increasing management responsibility - and little discretionary time for hobbies.

Love your site. Mine is far less unique as I've been more interested in exploring the Raspberry Pi. I've got a few issues I need to look into, but the basics are working. Thanks for sharing your story...

Bob
Cheers,
Bob
User avatar
lloydh
Posts: 9
Joined: Sat 29 Oct 2016 8:55 pm
Weather Station: Home made
Operating System: Centos 7
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Re: My home brew system

Post by lloydh »

Hi Bob,

Good to see I'm not alone in using electronics to keep the grey matter ticking over. You haven't made the mistake I and many others made when we started with a Raspberry by expecting too much from it.
radilly wrote:Hi Lloyd-
For my part, the loss of technical skill is more the result of increasing management responsibility

Bob
I avoided managerial positions even though I filled that sort of position temporarily many times while my manager was away but didn't like it, I always saw myself as a "coal face worker" because I was always happy with hands on roles.

Lloyd.
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