Additional Home Page updates and testing new skycam

Some more adjustments to the main home page. Had been using RRSdog.com to pull the Environment Canada Weather Alerts, but they had some outages today, so AI and I tackled how to run it on my web server. Also updated the code to now show the new Environment Canada Weather colour codes when weather alerts happen. This will make it more noticeable when an alert happens.

A hardware change, I’m testing a new sky cam option. Had found out that the low cost (under $50) Wyze V3 cameras support RTSP connections. This allows me to run a script to pull an image off the camera and then upload it to the website. Most Wyze cameras only work with Wyze’s app. Not sure if the camera will survive Alberta winters. Will see if this becomes permanent. The original skycam (a Logitech webcam from 2012 running on Windows XP embedded) will continue to run and provide the webpage background image and backup if the Wyze camera fails.

Think I’m done the homepage modernization project for now. Let me know if anything glitches for you.
Enjoy the updates and happy weather watching!

Massive Weather Home Page Upgrade

For years, I’ve known there were issues with my weather station website’s layout, especially on mobile devices. I made several attempts to fix them but could never quite get things working the way I wanted.
With the help of AI, I was finally able to clean up the code and make significant improvements. Thanks to Google Gemini, the homepage is now far more mobile-friendly and responsive. Formatting issues have been resolved, and the layout now scales properly on larger displays.
I hope you enjoy the updates, and as always—happy weather watching!
Cheers, Jeff

Good Davis WX resource

Been doing some research lately and found this good resource for the Davis weather stations. So just saving the link here for future self.
Manual: https://www.manula.com/manuals/pws/davis-kb/1/en/topic/general-please-read

Some Notes
Interesting info on Barometer Pressure.
https://www.manula.com/manuals/pws/davis-kb/1/en/topic/pressure-reading-problems

The intrinsic accuracy of the barometric pressure readings for both Vue and VP2 stations is quoted as ±1mb or ±0.03“Hg and, once calibrated, most units will track other high-quality pressure readings in the locality pretty well and to within this nominal accuracy. There may be some long-term drift, in which case an occasional recalibration against a reference reading should fix any slight problem.

However, stations that are located at significant altitude (eg 1000-2000ft and above) may experience more frequent discrepancies against reference readings. This is not necessarily caused by any fault with the console but can arise because of the way that corrections are made from the measured local pressure back down to sea level. (The more elevated the location, the greater any sea-level correction will be, which is why this issue is usually only noticeable at stations located at significant altitude.)

When I compare my barometer readings to what Windy.com is showing for this area, my station is within 1mb. I do puzzle why so many other personal weather stations in the area are so different. Maybe they have drifted or not been calibrated correctly or is mine off. Since I cannot compare to an official calibrated one, I tried to calibrate mine to the airports in the area on a stable air pressure day.


Another topic of exploration was if I could move my UV and solar sensors to the anemometer mount point so they would never be in the shade. The sensor transmitter has plugs for UV and Solar, but found this text stating that it would not work.

https://www.manula.com/manuals/pws/davis-kb/1/en/topic/uv-sensor

Other transmitters: Users often notice that supplementary transmitters such as the 6332 Anemometer Transmitter or the 6372 or 6382 Temperature Stations use exactly the same transmitter board as the ISS, which therefore has sockets to connect solar or UV sensors. Regrettably you cannot use these supplementary solar/UV inputs. The reason is that solar/UV data must be received by the standard VP2 console as ISS data and the VP2 system allows only one ISS per station. (The supplementary stations will in fact transmit the solar/UV data, but this can only be received by eg an Envoy8X or Meteobridge Pro Red unit.)