Ideas for special setup wanted

Hello everybody!
I’m new to this software, and the last day I’ve been looking trough the FAQ’s to see if anything fits my situation.

First, what I want: To collect weather data at a remote cabin, where power is limited (solar and wind), and therefore it’s difficult to run a computer continuous. The data should be sent to a local server at my homeplace, where “everybody” can see the actual weather at the cabin. Data don’t have to be realtime, a delay of 3 - 5 hours is acceptable.

Next, what I have: A weatherstation, of course. I’ve got a LaCrosse 2300 (not listed as “supported” by WeatherDisplay, but it gets the data in realtime), a 12V computer and a GRPS/GSM datamodem.

Now, here’s my ideas of how it can be done. Should you have any other ideas / solutions, please let me know!

1:The LaCrosse is set to log internally all weatherdata, with 10 minutes interval. Every 4 hour, the computer is turned on via external timer, WS starts up and reads the data from the LaCrosse, prepares an xml file and sends it via GRPS to my server. After this is done, computer shuts down automatic, and wait for next power-on signal from timer.

2: The LaCrosse stores data as above. When computer is turned on, the original HeavyWeather software is activated, reads the data from the WeaterStation and saves/append it to the history file. An external FTP client send this file to the server, where WD reads the data and prepares an html file which is made public. This would result in an ever increasing history file being sent via an expensive GRPS connection. I think it would be vise to keep that file small by either making a new one for each transmission or at other regular intervals. Maybe the WD can append all collected data to a database, in oder to extract historical data for different time intervals.

Hopefully I managed to get my idea presented in an understandable way. Any tips, ideas or hint for this setup is most welcome. Main concern in the remote cabin is that: Power is limited, data transmission is expensive, and system should be failsafe, so any crashes or “hangs” is reset automatically. The computers power can be totally shut down to facilitate resetting, this is done via the external timer.

Greetings from Stavanger, Norway, where I wait for any input!

-Roffee

the 2310 only stores 175 data records
thats only 175 minutes at 1 minute resolution (and with WD i can only find 125 data records , and its not 100% working correct (But i am working on using the HW history.dat file directly (but have not had time to finish that yet))
wherewas the davis vp is over 2 days at 1 minute resolution…
but , yes, wd can now fill any any database gaps too

Unless you are into programming you’ll probably want to use a windows macro program to control the data gathering and ftp process. If you do then it should be easy to rename the data file after it has been transmitted so that the new file will only contain new data, and also to concatenate the new data onto the existing data at the receiving end.

You can search this forum for other posts about the 2300 to get a better idea if its data logging capabilities are going to meet your needs.

Have you considered a UPS? It probably wouldn’t be able to keep the computer running through all the downtime, but it is set to automatically shutdown on extended power loss then reboot when power comes up it might work?

Tarma