Has anyone constructed something similar to the Peet Bros Weather Picture for use with other type stations? I would love to have one hooked to my station.
Dan,
I showed to my daughter and she’ll see if she can make something similiar.
Ed
Reminds me of the Heathkit unit of the 70’s… 
Nice real display, so you want you mimic it … just a few graphic tricks I guess - good project!!
Interested to see the result!
I think you could make something reasonably equivalent for the $400 they are charging. It could be run from a serial port on the WD PC with a small program on the PC reading the clientraw and sending the data to a microprocessor in the “picture”. Be nicer to use an LCD monitor though.
Yeah, it’s called a Texas Weather Instrument station. 
Ducking for cover. 
I don’t see Peet Bros listed in the station setup for WD. I was thinking that if WD worked with the Peet Bros station that in theory it should be possible to interface WD with the Weather Picture. Or am I drawing too many conclusions?
WD does support Peet, look for Ultimeter, but it looks like the weather picture is connected direct to the station’s serial output. Might work with a splitter though depending on the handshaking (if any).
So I’m thinking if WD could output a serial stream in the Peet format then it should be possible to interface one of these with any weather station that runs WD? Vplive might come in handy if the WD computer has only one serial port.
Now if the Weather Picture was wireless…
thats not a silly idea Norcal Dan
it needs to be in the utlimeter complete record mode (i think)
this is possible
Peet has their serial specs on their website. So WD could be set to output serial data in the Utlimeter complete record mode to the Weather Picture? If it’s possible to get the data from WD to the Weather Picture I can order one and do some testing. Do I need vplive or gpsgate or similar so I can send the data from the same serial port WD is using?
I have something somewhat similar in mind for use at work.
- Attach a 1 wire interface to my work pc
- Hook a hobbyboards LCD driver to it, with a 4 line backlit LCD
- Put the LCD in a nice case and hang on the exterior wall of my cube
- Write a program to run on my work pc that reads my current weather conditions file from my website, formats it for the 4 line display, and sends it out over the 1-wire to display on the LCD
I have my WD set up to generate a custom page that just sets PHP variables with my current weather data once a minute. My site then includes this in a much larger PHP presentation page that lays them out and displays the values. This keeps my bandwidth down. You could also parse the clientraw, if you are using that.
You could also have the program read in metar data, forecasts, warnings, DowJones? etc, and cycle through displaying various items of interest.
Steve
dan, you would need a separate serial port (e.g usb to serial)
wd already outputs the data logging mode ultimeter data to a serial port for a TNC
but the weather picture needs the complete record mode (its alot of data)
Brian, the blurb on the Peet website indicates that the weather picture accepts data in either data logger or complete record mode.
humm,ok,
strangely i get ultimeter owners telling me that they need the ultimeter set to complete record mode to get the weather picture to work
(complete record mode is alot of data, and so its better to only use data logging mode)
so if this is correct, then wd will work now, via the aprs tnc serial data out ultimeter format setup (see under setup,create aprs file, output to a TNC serial port)
I don’t have a Ultimeter, I use a vp2. I could be wrong, but my take on this is that I would need the data coming out of WD in the Ultimeter serial format for the Weather Picture to be able to read it. Is the tnc serial output the same as the raw Ultimeter data coming into WD? For what the display shows I think it would be better to just use a custom output with the temp, humidity, barometer, rain, wind dir and speed, wind chill and hi gust time and speed. The complete mode looks like it contains a lot of data compared to what the display is showing.
if you set it up as i have described above then it should work
(even though you have a vp2)
I don’t have a weather picture to verify it with my ultimeter, but the reference to data logging mode wasn’t in the literature previously IIRC - perhaps it’s something new. I would think, though, that data logging mode might be too fast for the weather picture - seems like data streams to WD very quickly with the unit set in data logging mode, and much, much more slowly in complete record mode.
Just looking at the serial specs on the Peet website, and the amount of data in complete mode must be at least triple the size of the other modes, all at 2400 baud.
Anyways, I am going to order one of these things and see if I can get it to work. USB to serial should be possible.
ok, good dan
if it has to be complete record mode, then i will have to conjur up that
The website has “FLEXIBLE - Accepts data from the serial output of an ULTIMETER 2100/2000/800/100 or 500 Weather Station in either the data logger mode or complete record mode. (Accepts new Multimode) Powered from an included 12 volt ac adapter.”