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Weather Station idea.....

Sometimes I wish that I had not had that "bright idea" which ends up wasting a lot of time and money! That's how I feel about this little project - the idea to install a weather station in the house, and have the date available over the Internet. Sounds simple eh? Well not so in practice.

Most of the solutions for this require a PC permanently switched on with the weather station attached. Not wanting to waste energy with a PC the research was done on how to connect a serial (RS-232) weather station to the ethernet network, to the router and out to the big wide world. Now there are "off the shelf" solutions for this if you want to spend a couple of thousand dollars, but I wanted to spend a couple of hundred pounds!

Lots of people use the La Crosse line of weather stations and the WS-2300 is available for a £100 on ebay in the UK.

 

 

So how to connect this to ethernet? After a lot of research I found a serial to ethernet converter on ebay for £50 that seemed to offer the right specifications - the Netcom-10s. Now even though this was meant to be in the UK it shipped from China, however it arrived in 3 days, (much faster than a lot of goods from the UK). So the good news it arrived quickly, the bad news the instructions and CD were in Chinese!

 

 

After an hour or so the password had been discovered and we were talking to its built in webserver and configuring it. Well even this was not straightforward and the unit locked itself up and it took a couple of hours to work out how to reset it (not by using the button inside that says reset!)

After having configured it correctly, and installing the supplied (after hunting through the CD) virtual serial port driver for a pc I connected it all together and...... it doesn't work.

A quick trip into the loft to find my RS-232 break-out box (after 10 years of not being used the batteries still worked!) to look at what activity there was on the serial port out of the Netcom-10s. The good news was there was data being sent by the PC. The bad news was that CTS/RTS signals were not being sent and these are required by the WS-2300 (still with me I hope?).

So that where we are today, it looks like the hardware doesn't support CTS/RTS but I have emailed China to confirm this. The alternatives then are to buy another serial to ethernet box that does support it, to find a 'fix' for the WS-2300 to remove the requirement for CTS/RTS , or to buy another weather station that doesn't require it.

Back to the drawing board for now.....