Peppo Weather Station

PeppoWS was created by me (peppo ;p) to keep an eye on the weather in the back-garden in an attempt to help my dear and beloved partner (S) who has real problems in case of heavy rain.

This is the BETA II (v2.1) release of the system.

technology used

A quick overview of the technologies used here (and their cost), there are of course both hardware and software involved here.

hardware - weather station

The weather station is a WS3083 Professional Wireless Weather Station, from AERCUS Instruments, it has the following sensors:

Rain Gauge: it measures quantity of rain in millimeters and calculates the rainfall-rate in mm/h
Anemometer: it measures the wind speed in Km/h and calculates average speed and gusts
Wind Direction sensor: it detects the average direction of the wind and gusts
Solar sensors: it measures the UV Index and Solar Radiations
Outdoor Thermo-hydro sensor: it measures temperature, humidity, pressure and calculates wind chill, dew point and heat index

I bought it in Amazon for about 150 euro (delivery included).

hardware - computer

The weather station is, of course, connected to a computer that that is always on (or almost always), the computer is a notebook from Samsung (NP-NF210) with a reasonably good spec for a notebook, about 3 years old.

The computer has the lid always down (monitor off) and runs at very low consumption (only weather station programs).

The computer was in a desk drawer, not really used in about a year, however, when I bought it it was about 300 euro.

software - Cumulus

To get the data from the weather station I am using a beautiful freeware program called Cumulus (by Sandysoft).
It works brilliantly (thanks ;p) and it gets a all data from the weather station every 5 minutes into plain text files (some comma separated).
It also calculates a number of additional indexes (some shown in this site, some other not) that are very great for a data-geek like me.

software - Peppo WS (BETA II)

Then I have developed a couple of pieces of software (I do programming for living... so far) to do a number of things.

Peppo WS (BETA II) - Server Component

This component is written in C# and uses two SQL databases, one database is local and store all data cumulatively, the other is a small version of the same database that runs on-line and only contains a number of days.
This is to avoid having an ever increasing size on the on-line database (which I cannot do as I have a very low space limit). The program runs as windows service and is in charge of a number of things:

Data Gathering: it gets the data from the Cumulus text files into the local database
Data Uploads: it uploads the data gathered into the on-line database (from the local one)
Data Analysis: it runs rainfall data analysis and produces eventual warnings
Mail Manager: it sends regular weather reports to a mailing list and any mail generated by other services
Maintenance: it runs some maintenance tasks, such as regular re-boots or windows updates, it then restarts all the required services and software.

All the above is to get early warnings in case of heavy rain and get notified if anything goes wrong.

Peppo WS (BETA II) - Web Component

This component is written with ASP.NET and runs on an hosted Windows domain (SQL/IIS) and is the (small) web application you are currently using (we are in the about page ;p).

The interface uses 'responsive-design' and should show ok on every computer or device such as Smartphone or Tablet.

To see how this site works check-out the help page.

Contact me ;p)

If you like to contact me, just mail me at: p.pelligano@gmail.com, I'll be glad to reply ;p)