Good Things About My 1 Wire Weather Station
This information is from a 1 wire weather system in the southern portion of McKinney Texas. The software that is reading and posting this information is great! Highly recommended, the link is below.
All components are connected through a single telephone(or Cat5) wire, with regular phone jacks on the end. The wires are crossed, though. A phone wire with plugs on the end must be modified in order to work.
My weather station is still a work in progress. I have slowly assembled the pieces,one by one. I still need to get a barometric pressure sensor.
The rain gauge is mounted on my storage building, not in the yard as shown in this picture. It is pretty accurate, as near as I can tell.
I am currently running the software and collecting data on an old Emachine. My old IBM needs a reinstall of win98, It's been running on the same install for at least 2 years. Is that a record for win98? :^)
Just kidding! I hope to get it back on the IBM soon.
It's 7-16-2005, and we have been getting showers about every day for a week! First rain we've had in a couple of months, but still only about an inch this week. Oh well, thats good for July.
The information is updated every 10 minutes, as long as windows98 is up!
Update 9-30-2006
I am currently having problems with my weather station. I believe it to be wire related. When I have the time, I will see about replacing the wiring, in order to get things going again. Thanks for bearing with me.
Update 11-11-2006
Finally! A new wire is in place for the weather station! Everything is back online again. I hope it will be trouble free for a while. Looks like we had over 8 inches of rain here since it last counted back in September.
Update 1-1-2007
The year of 2006 ended with my rain gauge registering 34 inches. The drought is still in effect, although the year total was almost average.
Update 2-5-2007
January was a cold and wet month for us. I ended the month with 5.46" of rain, snow , sleet, etc. It was a good start on the year for precipitation, adding some water to the lakes.
Update 3-3-2007
February ended with only 0.46" of precipitation, some frozen, and some liquid. Not enough to do any good for our dry conditions around here. We had 60 MPH winds from the west on the 24th, accompanied by a dust storm! Overall, a cold month, although it ended very spring-like.
Update 4-1-2007
Well, I'm back on the Emachine. It seems that the old IBM has some problems! So far I can't get it to load a copy of 98SE, or Ubuntu Linux. I think it has some kind of flaky hardware problem. I'm still trying to track it down.
The month of March ended with 4.45 inches of rain. Almost all of it fell on the last week of the month. There was a probable small tornado in Wylie, just 10 miles from here on the 30th.
Update 5-1-2007
Rainfall total for April is 5.78 inches. Once again, most of that was the last week of the month. 4 1/2 inches in one day! I have moved my main weather
data page to a new webhost, Orgfree.com. It is uploading the files much more reliably than Angelfire did. Still have the other stuff at Angelfire for now. I like their webshell better so far.
Update for May of 2007...13.71 inches of rain! What a wet month! Happy to see it.
Update for June 2007....13.34 inches of rain! Officially, 2nd wettest June ever for the Dallas area! All the lakes are full, places are flooding.
Update for July 2007.... 5 inches of rain, a lot of rain for July, I think we are in the top 10 wettest July's recorded. Still no 100 degree days this year.
Update August 2007.... A fairly mild August for us, with only a very few days at 100 deg. A bit of rain, mostly at the first of the month, with a small amount in the final week. My rain gauge went wacky in a heavy shower in the first week of the month, so I'm guessing that we got a couple of inches total for the month.
End of 2007 update...
Happy New Year!
Ok, it's been awhile since my last update. But according to my data, we had 68 inches of rain here this year. Maybe that's a little over, but it was a very wet year. I think DFW had about 55 inches officially.
Links To Software and Equipment
Software I am Using
1 wire Kit (wind and temperature)
Weather Underground-My Info
Humidity Sensor, rain gauge convertor, and serial port adapter can be found here
Fascinating Electronics Rain Gauge Kit