Wired weather

My personal weather station at home has had problems for awhile.  The turbine on the wind sensor seized up ages ago and the rain sensor has been flaky for awhile as well.  I found a place that sells parts and scratch and dent versions of the weather equipment.  I could have just bought new sensors for about $30 each but I saw i could get an entire new complete weather station for $78 so I opted for the latter.

So I decided last night after work I would work on setting it up.  Originally I just planned on swapping out the sensors and keeping the other parts intact.  The way it is set up now, the outdoor sensor runs off of batteries and transmits it’s data wirelessly to the home base inside.  There is an option to hard wire the outside unit to the indoor unit via a RJ-11 telephone cable.  The wireless set up is convenient but it also can be flaky.  I have found that the wireless communication is spotty.  Also, when you use the wireless option, data is transmitted much less frequently than if it is wired together.  When you use the wired option everything is powered by the base station inside, another bonus, no more batteries.

I never pursued the wired option because basically it seemed like too much of a pain in the ass to get the cable out there.  Well for some reason last night the inspiration hit me.  After swapping out the sensors I strung the base station cable from the orchard to the house.  I barely had enough cable to reach but I was determined to give it a try.  I open the screen and the window to pull the cable in.  The phone cable was thin enough that I could close everything back up securely.  I was careful to not pinch the cable.

Next I headed outside.  I had to make provisions for mowing and weed whacking.  If this was going to work I would have to bury the cable.  I routed the cable out the window, into the rock border by the house and dug hole under the plastic edging and routed the cable under there.  I wrapped the end of the connector in aluminum foil to protect it and keep it clean.  I pulled out a 30 year old edging tool that we picked up from one of my relatives.  I used it to cut a small slice into the turf then rocked it back and forth to give me a little trench to push the phone cable into.  The tool was only maybe a foot long at the most so I had to make quite a few little slices.  After maybe 45 minutes of work I was down to the remote weather transmitter in the orchard.  Once again I had to go under the orchard border and come back the other side.

So I dig out under the rotting landscape timbers and all of a sudden thousands of angry big carpenter ants come swarming out.  Evidently they have taken up residence in the rotting wood.  They were everywhere and they were pissed.  The hole that I dug out was filled with them.  I didn’t quite feel like jamming my hand in there to fish the cable through in that circumstance.  So I waited a few minutes to see if the activity would die down.  It slowed down a little but there were still plenty of ants mulling about when my patience ran out.  I grabbed the end of the cable and jammed it through the hole quickly.  I was rewarded for my efforts with several bites from angry ants that I quickly swatted away.  I connected the cable to the transmitter and I was ready to go.

I went back inside and verified I had communication with the outside world.  Yep, it was all working, sweet.  I modified my weather info web page to once again include wind speed and direction info.  I am anxiously awaiting our next rain event so we can once again accurately know how much has fallen on our property. 

One of the issues that Ali and I have with timing races is people that have terrible hand writing.  I can’t tell you how many times we have to make an educated guess about what is on the entry forms.  The problem is if we guess wrong, that inaccurate information gets fed into the timing system which in turn causes various problems down the road.  Well the club makes PDF versions of the race entry forms available online that people can print out, fill out by hand and then send in.  I thought it would be awesome if somehow I could make these forms fillable online so the people are typing their info in before printing it out.  Well after a bit of homework I found out how to do just that. I took it a step further.  Not only can you fill out the form online, it REQUIRES you to fill out several required fields before allowing you to print the form, pretty cool.