Didsbury Alberta Unoffical Weather Station

Been 3 years since I installed the new weather station and I haven’t done any maintenance on it. So it was long over due.

The 11:30am to 1pm data for outside temp and humidity today will be missing as the sensors were offline.

New batteries for the 24 hour Fan-Aspirated Shield. This should hopefully correct temperature readings as the old batteries were not keeping the fan running 24/7 anymore.

New backup battery for the temperature/humidity/rain collector.

Full cleaning and wipe down for the Intergrated Sensor Suite.

In check the console’s battery and signal reception of the station, I somehow reset the console, so today’s historic data was reset.

Was puzzled why the wind speed was reporting nothing but the plants in the yard where swaying. Looking up at anemometer I found it twisted 45 degrees and all muddy.

Below was a nice mess to clean up

This happen sometime overnight and was corrected by 10:45am.

This has been a first for my weather equipment in the last 9 years.

Enjoy the warm weather!

The new weather station is now broadcasting current weather information to the Internet.

Upload your bookmarks to: http://weather.bluevistaventures.ca/

Currently I’m going to use the Davis WeatherLink website to make the information available.  In the coming days, I’ll start uploading to WUnderground Weather site to provide access to historic data and graphing.  Also WUnderground now has a very nice iPhone and Android app that can display my weather station with forecasts and radar images.  I’ll provide information on setup once this is ready.  I’ve also enabled the skycam image.  This image is uploaded every 5 minutes and is point West NorthWest.
Current Image:

I have plans for additional content and formating of the data which I’ll continue to work on when I have time.

Enjoy – Jeff

There will be some massive disruptions to the live weather conditions over the next few weeks.  The new weather station has arrived and I’m in the process of getting it setup and configured.  This is just in time as the old one which has been in operations since February 2005 has become very brittle.  I was gently cleaning a spider web off the anemometer just last week and ended up breaking one of the wind cups.  Lucky some Crazy Glue fixed it.

After a fair bit of research and consideration about mounting options, I’ve mounted the new anemometer 6+ feet above the roof line with a full 360 degree reading.  Old one was mounted on the fence which had poor reading from the south.

I’ve gone with a satellite mounting bracket with a PVC extension tube with a wood insert.  Didn’t want to put holes in the roof and didn’t want to create a lightning rod. I’m monitoring the setup as there is a little bit of sway in winds over 20km/h.  The base is very stable up till about 3-4 feet in height.  Currently the new wind reading have had better accuracy.

I’m still working on placement of the rain bucket and temperature module.   I’m also testing a new “skycam” setup and will hopefully have a eye to the sky with the new site.

The current Live Weather Conditions site is still displaying the data from the old station.

Stay tuned, Cheers Jeff

A while back I decided to ditch the old site templates and setup that I used to run the “Olds Alberta Weather Station” site. Reason, my weather station hardware is nearing retirement and the software used for the site only works with that weather station.  So rather than reworking the templates and setup for the new location, I’ve dumped it and will start fresh.

I’ve decided to try Cumulus from Sandaysoft as the weather station monitoring software.  I had looked at it back in 2007 or 2008, but to move off the FreeWX-Wi was too much work at the time.  The big benefit for me now is Cumulus supports multiple weather stations, so I can change to a new weather station (hopefully in the coming months) without having to recode the website.  Another big benefit with Cumulus is its nice starter package of web templates.  Without much work, the main site is up, a fancy gauge version, and an iPhone site.  I’m still missing lots of the data that I use to show, but I can slowly build upon this.  With my current time to this project very limited over the last year and foreseeable future, this allows me to share the current weather conditions without a lot of work.

Because I’m not running the web server in my home anymore, the uploads to the main website is not every minute, but every ten minutes.  This is due to bandwidth issues with the graphs and html pages.  The Silverlight desktop version only uses a small text file, so that file I can upload more often.  I’ll probably eventually run it in-house again, but for the meantime, this is easier to support.  The likelihood of disconnect between the weather station and the web site is much greater now, so watch the conditions date and time.

Happy weather watching, Jeff

After being offline for almost 1 year, I’ve got the old weather station back online – sort of.

http://weather.bluevistaventures.ca/

I’ve ran into glitches, delays and mainly lack of time to put into this project.
One of the biggest challenges has been placement of the sensors. The anemometer isn’t properly positioned and will not give accurate measurements. The rest is fairly accurate, now.
The big stop in getting back online was placement of the computers and the weather station. The USB extender I had planned to use was unreliable and after a month of trying to get it to stop crashing the system, I gave up on it. Currently the laptop sits beside the weather station, but this configuration cannot be permanent.
Also, the station is now 6 years old and when I had it down, I found that the solar rechargeable batteries have expired. Replacement cost $150. So I’m now investigating a new replacement station.
Also the software I’ve been using, FreeWX-Wi, has stopped development and no more fixes will be issued. I was having problems with one temperature sensor not reporting correctly in the software. So I need to try implementing a new software package.  For now I’ll continue to use it to display current conditions.

So where does this leave me. Pondering over a new more accurate weather station and a shiny new site and setup.

Until then, the site will offer basic data information updated every minute.

Just a quick update for those who are checking in here and there.  I’ve got the weather station temporarily up, but location of sensors needs to be adjusted as I’m getting incorrect readings.  Due to work and other tasks, I haven’t been able to dedicate much time to this project.

Hello Olds and Central Alberta Weather Watchers,

All great things must come to an end eventually, and this is the end of this site.  The Westside Olds weather station will be ceasing operation December 16, 2010 due to relocating away from Olds. I’ll still be in the area and will most likely be broadcasting live weather from my new location – but it won’t be as relevant to Olds residents.

History Data is no longer available on Weather Underground.  I still have raw text files of this data (May 2006 to Dec 2010)

History WebCam 1:

http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/OldsAB/1/show.html?year=2008&month=10&time=noon#ca

History WebCam2:

http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/oldswebcam2/1/show.html?year=2010&month=08&time=noon#cal

Hoped you enjoyed the service while it was available.  Happy weather watching.

Jeff