My Weather Station

My Davis Vantage Pro2

I finally got my weather station up-and-running and reporting to the Weather Underground!
URL: http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KVAHENRI14

I wanted it to be more than just a way to check the outside temperatures. Also, I didn't want to have a full computer running all the time to gather the data (The Davis WeatherLink software only runs on Windows). So I decided to buy a rabbery pi.(http://www.raspberrypi.org/): a $35 mini-computer the size of a credit card.

How cool is this little thing!!!

The little dongle sticking out is a USB Wireless adapter. Which actually works amazing on the Rasbery Pi!!! All I had to do was plug it in and press the WPS button on it and my router. Then, it was connected!!! As for an Operating System, I choose Raspian: http://www.raspbian.org/. I liked it MUCH better than Arch Linux. I tried Arch first, but man, I had to configure every little thing manually - like DHCP settings. Raspian seems like it is basically Dabian, but smaller and built for the Pi. It has been working perfectly for me!!!

As for the software, there are these amazing people over at WeeWX: http://www.weewx.com/. They have software that will interface with almost any personal weather station and its built for Linux! It's really easy to set-up, just follow their directions. They also have a large user group which actively posts on the forum and answers many technical questions. They only thing I did wrong (and it took me almost two weeks to figure out) is that you have to see up a MySql database first to store your weather data. I assumed their code would do it for me (dumb of me). However, even I was able to download MySQL, set up a database, a table, a user (weewx) and set a password. 

Somehow, I finally did it! I am very proud of my weather station (counsel pic below). Thanks to my AMAZING husband for buying it for my birthday!!! LOVE you babe!!