[today: rest day, yesterday: 3.4 miles]
We are starting to get some heat around here recently!
A few weeks ago the weather station in Starkville quit working. So last weekend I stopped by and collected the equipment to bring home and see what’s up.
A recap: I purchased three weather station devices off of the GSA auction site. They are nice units from Vaisala, usually cost a few thousand $$ each.
I built two weather stations. The first was this one in Starkville and the second as at my house here in Columbus. I sold the last weather unit to help fund the overall project.
I used a beaglebone single-board-computer (SBC) which runs a flavor of linux, and the wview software. Wview is able to talk to the Vaisala weather equipment. The station in Starkville used the beaglebone-white, an earlier version SBC which runs off of a mini-SD memory card. The Columbus station uses a later beaglebone-black which has static internal memory.
The problem with the SD card as a fake disk drive is that SD cards wear out. After a year of 24×7 operation the Starkville station doesn’t want to boot up any more.
So I have acquired another beaglebone-black and I’m going to get the thing configured and running again.
I had a bit of a scare with the weather station gizmo. When removed from the installation the bottom of the thing was full of ants, ant eggs and junk. I took it apart and brushed and blew it out with some compressed air. Then I tried to get the station to talk to me and had a real struggle. I stripped down the hardware completely, thinking that maybe the ants had messed up the circuit boards. But other than dirty there’s no problem there. For awhile I was sure it was dead. Finally I read the instruction book and got the thing to talk to me.
Now I have the new beaglebone-black talking to the weather station. That means the serial port hardware is configured and working. I have Wifi working, but it needs some more attention to make sure it comes up on reboot. And then I need to build apache, php and wview.