Hi, I am trying to set up a weather station at the same site that I have a Stardot netcam. Apparently the netcam can poll and upload weather station data through its serial port. I am trying to get away from having a computer at the site since this is why I bought the netcam in the first place. According to Stardot this is what has to happen:
“The NetCam sends an ASCII linefeed-terminated command and the weather station replies with ASCII line-feed terminated data string”
Ok, the challenge seems to be finding an affordable weather station (<$400) that will allow this. I only really need wind speed and direction (barometric pressure would be a bonus). I have looked at the Davis Weather Monitor II but, according to Stardot, the output is proprietary and non-ASCII. Also the Peet Bros Ultimeter 100, but it seems to send out a stream of data without being polled and NetCam can’t easily be programmed to continuously pick up data. The one unit that Stardot supports is the Capricorn 2000 by Columbia Weather, but this seems to be about $2000.
So, any suggestions, or has anyone ever tried anything like this before. It would be great to be able to send the weather data along with the webcam image. Or is there any other option that would allow me to FTP weather station data without the use of a PC.
Thanks for the comments. I still haven’t found a way to interface a weather station with the Stardot, so if you figure it out let me know.
I have two netcam MP’s now and I am really happy with their picture quality. I am having trouble with one of them but the tech support at Stardot is pretty good and they have sent me a replacement cam.
There are cheaper cams out there but it’s hard to beat the Stardot picture quality. The regular netcam is good too and quite a bit cheaper than the MP.
They are easy to set up, tech support is good if needed, and they are reliable. So I would recommend them. Some drawbacks are the slower frame rates (640x480 only every 15sec) and they mostly use fixed iris and zoom lenses. It was hard for me to figure out the best lens to get. They offer a varifocal lens and a motorized zoom lens with auto iris. One of my cams has the motorized zoom and it works really well but it is expensive. You can actually zoom right in on the water and see the water texture which is great for windsurfing/kiteboarding.
Howdy,
This reply is probably way out of date but I thought I’d jump in and share my solution to this problem.
I have a davis weather monitor II attached to my pc at the house. Out in the back I have a netcam on a pole for watching the sky.
I wanted to find a way to get the netcam to read in and overlay the davis weather conditions.
This still involves a pc but the pc and the netcam do not have to be physically linked or even in the same place / building/ country for that matter! :lol:
Here’s how I set it up…
The davis unit uploads a text file version of the current stats to a webserver via ftp.
A small script runs every 3 mins via crontab in the netcam to go out to the webserver and get the updated conditions file.
(see the script and crontab below)
#Getstats script
#!/bin/sh
cd /etc/config #change to the netcams config directory
rm netcam.overlay #remove the old overlay file just for good measure
rm Current.wml #remove the previously dloaded current stats text file
wget http://users.taylortel.net/~kevinp/Current.wml -O /etc/config/Current.wml #go get the newest stats file from the web #change the url to point to your server/ conditions file ^ ^ ^
sleep 1 #pause the script for 1 second
cat /etc/config/titletime > netcam.overlay # I created a separate text file with the netcam name and time codes, appends this to
# to the overlay file
echo ‘\033b’ >> netcam.overlay #appends a formatting command to the overlay file to put the current conditions at the #bottom of the image
cat /etc/config/Current.wml >> netcam.overlay #appends the current stats into the netcam overlay
exit
_______________________________-
CronTab that runs the script every 3 mins…
A modified overlay.sh script then overlays the netcam.overlay file onto the netcam image. #a note here… I have the overlay.sh re append the time and title as well because #occasinally the title would mess up. This could be fixed but once I had it working #I got lazy and never went back to fix it. (if it aint broke… dont fix it!)
again I realize this is probably a late posting but I hadn’t seen anyone else asking about this and I thought I’d share since Id had the same questions when I started. Also if this can be useful to anyone else I won’t feel like I wasted my time on some silly project. :lol:
If I can be of assistance helping anyone else do this for their netcam please just ask!
I hope this helps!
Kevin (Malathar) Palivec
(NOTE: recently stardot has added some documentation for allowing the netcam to mount a networked drive via SMB and this method will eliminate the need for the ftp upload to a webserver but for this setup the ftp is prefered so the camera and the pc monitoring the davis unit dont hhave to be on the same LAN. ) http://www.stardot-tech.com/developer/index.html
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing your script. I plan on allowing WD to handle the Stardot webcam when I get it, but I like your idea and may set it up as a backup.
[quote author=Malathar link=topic=5429.msg61255#msg61255 date=1113928223]
Howdy, This reply is probably way out of date but I thought I’d jump in and share my solution to this problem.
I have a davis weather monitor II attached to my pc at the house. Out in the back I have a netcam on a pole for watching the sky. I wanted to find a way to get the netcam to read in and overlay the davis weather conditions.
This still involves a pc but the pc and the netcam do not have to be physically linked or even in the same place / building/ country for that matter!
The Netcam updates the image to the web every 15 seconds. Only the stats update every 3 mins.
The Reason I have the script update the stats every 3 mins is mainly to keep the load down on my dsl. The file sent is small but if it was shooting it out to the web server every 30 seconds or so. My webhost might get annoyed at me and my outgoing bandwidth would suffer a small amount.
Also the fact that the file is going out of the house and then the camera is grabbing it back in so the data flow is two way and thus doubled.
Other than that, there’s no reason why it couldnt be updated more often… it’s just a personal preference
Another reason is that I figure not much is going to change weather-wise in 3 mins so it was just a happy medium.
The camera continues to update the time at the normal rate. Only the text in the stats takes 3 mins to change.
Also if you watch the image for a few mins you’ll notice that occasionally there’s a 1-3 second period that the stats seem to vanish,
This is due to the image refreshing in the netcam while the stats file is being deleted and then refreshed.
This could be fixed by writing the stats text to a temp file and then renaming it when the wget is finished… but DARN theres that
old "I was lazy and never fixed it after I got it running) thing again! hehehe!
My dream is to one day have the netcam poll the weather station and ftp the info and eliminate the need for the pc. I know it can be done and it has been done on certain weather stations. It’s a future project of mine.
dave
Hopefully its OK to reopen this topic. I just got a Stardot Netcam up and running at a remote location. I do not want to add a remote PC just for a weather station. Has anyone figured out the recipe to link a weather station to the serial port? I don’t have the Linux scripting skills to get too far with the project without some good instructions. Another alternative would be a weather station with its own TCP/IP stack. Has anyone played with the WeatherHawk-IP system? Probably a budget buster. Thanks… -skibum
