Didsbury Alberta Unoffical Weather Station

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!

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

Finally got around to replacing the 24 hour fan for the temperature sensor. Hoping these new batteries get the fan spinning properly again and my temperature readings become more accurate.
To replace them, I had to pull the full base station apart, so gave it a good clean. It had been many years since I gave it a full clean. Was showing it, so much dirt and spider webs.
Tried so hard to not bump the rain sensor, but right at the end, oops. 0.2mm measured.
Few photos of the dirty unit.

All clean and back together. Plastic is really deteriorating on the sensor cover and top of the temperature housing. Weather Station has been operation for 13 plus years now! The Oregon Scientific I had before this one deteriorated in 6 years and the plastic was so brittle, parts were breaking. Highly recommend the Davis Weather stations.

Installed new backup lithium batteries both the anemometer transmitter and the main temp/rain/solar sensor transmitter.

Noticed the 24 hour Fan-Aspirated batteries are worn out and not keeping the fan running when lack of sunlight on the solar panel. On the repair todo list.

Didsbury had a massive thunderstorm last night (June 28, 2024) around 2-3am. It knocked the power out for a second and ended up scrambling the weather console and network upload module. A full reset this morning got it working again.
I have a second console gathering the same data, so I was able to add the rainfall we got after the uploading console was put offline. Data I couldn’t upload are the daily max wind gust of 47km/h at 2:24am. We also had a max rain rate of 113.0mm/hr at 2:27.

First time I’ve had the weather console glitch like that.

I was cleaning the spider webs and nests from the rain gauge and bumped the rain gauge and caused it to rain 0.4mm at 6pm today.

www.didsburywx.ca

Well, I finally gave my personal weather site it’s own Internet address. For years the weather stuff was part of my side business BlueVistaVentures.ca. I had helped a few people build and configure personal weather stations and websites. Now that I’ve retired the business, it is time to clean up 16 years of linkage and systems.

What is with the address name? Well, the first bit is obvious, the town the weather station is in. Didsbury, Alberta, Canada. The WX is morse code shorthand for the word weather. So it is commonly used as the abbreviation for the word weather. So the address is translate to: DidsburyWeather.Canada
Not to be confused with the township of Didsbury, UK, which is now a suburban area of Manchester, England. Which Didsbury, Alberta is named after.

Please update your bookmarks to the new address. The existing weather.bluevistaventures.ca will continue for another year or so.

Happy weather watching! Cheers, Jeff

The anemometer lithium backup battery doesn’t have enough power to send the data in this -37°C weather we are having. Stopped sending data at 4am. Although, it did find a bit of juice to send again at 5:30am. I had replaced the battery in June 2022, which should still be good. Replacement is now on the todo list this summer, when I can climb up onto the roof.

Once the sun gets up, power will be restored and wind speed and directions should start reporting again.

After 10 years of spinning 24/7, the bearings were not spinning as freely. I was able to replace with a newer to me anemometer sensor unit and then replaced the wind speed bearings. Hopefully more accurate wind speeds will be recorded now.
Also put in new backup lithium batteries both the anemometer transmitter and the main temp/rain/solar sensor transmitter.
Here is to another 10 years of spinning in the wind!

Got my hands on used Solar Radiation Sensor & UV Sensor. Installed today and data is now being tracked. I’ll see how long these last as they are about 6 years old already. The rest of the old used weather station will be used for back up parts.

Also did some basic cleanup on main sensor unit. Few spider webs and debris.