About
This is the old weather station used by weather.zx.net.nz from the 22nd of March 2012 until the 9th of February 2013. It is a Jaycar/digitech branded FineOffset WS1080 (A WH1080 with a solar panel). The same weather station is sold by many other companies besides Jaycar under various names. It is located in Newstead. It remains online to allow for testing WH1080 support in zxweather.
This station was replaced on the 9th of February 2013 with a new Davis Vantage Vue. See current weather station.
The software running on this site was specifically written for weather.zx.net.nz (hence its name - zxweather). It consists of a web interface written in Python, a PostgreSQL database and a logging program to download data from the weather station and load it into the database. The current version of the software that is powering weather.zx.net.nz is available under the GNU GPL from ftp://ftp2.zx.net.nz/pub/DGS/zxweather/readme.html.
This weather station started logging data around 4:59pm on the 22nd of March 2012 (the oldest sample in the database). On the 4th of April software was completed to the point of being able to load the first two weeks of readings into the database. Ten days later (4th April) the software was functional enough to run unattended automatically downloading new data every five minutes. Work on the web interface began on the same day with live data becoming available through it on the 14th of April.
The stations data had a few reliability issues. Mainly that the anemometer is a little bit sheltered by all the trees on the property (see below) and the temperature sensor still has its original radiation shield. The original one is not sufficient as direct sunlight casues a significant jump in the reported temperature. The rain gauge tended to attract quite a few spiders too.
Some icons are Copyright © Yusuke Kamiyamane. All rights reserved. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Some icons are from Glyph Icons and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.