We will be upgrading our webcam hardware this afternoon. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Castle Rock Weather is experiancing a webcam outage. Webcam images stopped at yesterday around 10:45 PM MDT. The issue appears to be DNS related and we are working with our ISP to resolve the issue. Thank you for your understanding while we work through this technical issue.

Update @ 9:48 AM MDT: ISP changed my IP address, which broke webcam PHP code. Code changed to use DNS URL instead of static IP. DNS records have been updated with new IP address. Looking into new ISP this morning, to avoid repeat.

Today @ 11:33 AM MDT the CRW Weather Server experienced catastrophic hardware failure. The problem was traced to a bad system board. The faulty system board was replaced and system operations restored. Data, collected by our instruments, during the outage was downloaded to the server. CRW.Org and data clients started receiving data @ 8:42 PM MDT.

We’ve replaced our rain sensor and everything appears to be working just fine. We will continue to monitor our rain collection numbers.

This weekend included a bunch of hardware drama. We are having network issues and sensor issues. It is true, “when it rains it pours!”

We are having problems with our cable modem. It has been dropping our connection nearly daily. Not a big deal if we’re home, but isn’t any fun when we’re at work. Yesterday was the last straw, and this evening we replaced our Linksys Cable Modem with a Motorola Surfboard. From what I’ve read this new modem is more reliable. We like reliable.

While diagnosing our cable modem issue we learned our Linksys firewall was swamped under our traffic loads. Two FTP devices, inbound webservices, uploading to our partners, and running our household internet took it’s toll. We have the little guy patched together the best we can. On order we have a business class Netgear Router/Firewall. Performance is nearly 15 times that of the Linksys. It arrives tomorrow, and should be deployed tomorrow evening.

We missed recording all of the rain that fell this weekend. We had a few good storms roll through, and our consoles, website, and software all read 0.00 in. We did some manual tests with little successs. We contacted Davis support, instead of going to work this morning. They believe our reed switch is faulty. They are shipping us new reed switches. Repairs should be completed early next week.

We appologize for these interuptions to your weather information site. Sometimes things are beyond our control. We are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.

We spent last weekend and early this week to installing the camera. We still have to tiddy up the CAT5 cable on the outside of the house, but its running. The second half of the week was spent working on delivery and image overlay (adding words over image). Those were 2 very tough problems.

FTP upload is a sore topic around the CRW offices. Our webhost limits the number of connections from our external IP address to 2. They have a package to expand this to unlimited, but it adds an extra $36 per month, and we need to become Linux server admins.

We are using the camera’s built in webserver, and allowing our webserver to connect via http directly and “pull” the image instead of pushing via FTP. The process avoids the FTP upload limits. So the image now is on the webserver, can we see it. We ran 24 hours without image overlays, but our goal is to include weather data directly on the webimage.

We tested ImageSalsa last week. Its a clunky, very complicated piece of software. The software does require a license purchased from Ambient Weather. The way things are going with VWS, we feel uncomfertable investing in that company any longer. ImageSalsa was uninstalled from our servers. Now what?

We have started working more and more with PHP, and figured there had to be something available which could replace ImageSalsa. Image overlaying is a process where you lay text directly over a base image, and create a new resultant image that includes your text. You can also use this to mask the source image, which we are.

Mike, from Long Beach, WA Weather, provided us with an awsome script to do all of that and more. We are currently using his script to transfer base image, resize, overlay text, and a partrige in a pear tree. One script that does it all. We then process our webcam image a second time through a simular script that creates the thumbnail image in the left navigation bar. Pretty slick.

I will update the “our equipment” page to include these two technologies that make our webcam come to life. We have plans to expand the information included on the text overlay. We are also working on scripts that will refresh the webcam image automagically, without refreshing the whole page. Down the road we will be looking for a way to stream video from our camera and provide time laps videos as well.

For now we’re up and running. Off to the next weather related project.

After months of research and testing we have purchased a brand new Panasonic BB-HCM531A to begin uploading images of the southern sky (Monument, Colorado). The process of selecting a camera proved to be more difficult then we expected. We wanted an outdoor camera that could operate in a temperature range of -10° F to 100° F. Power was a problem, as we did not have an outside receptacle/surge suppressor for the camera. Panasonic’s new BB-HCM500 series of cameras work with Power over Ethernet (PoE). In addition we do not have a PC anywhere near the south side of the house, so USB connectivity would not work reliably. Seams repeating USB was more of an exercise in luck then science, so the camera would have to work over our home network. The camera had to look good, because of the built in website feature of this camera, online suppliers were happy to set up demo sites for us to play with. We tried a few demo sites and were pleased with the image quality.

So where is the images from the camera? Well the camera arrived via UPS on Friday August 22, 2008. I’ve been battling illness and have not felt well enough to run the few hundred feet of CAT5 wire from the weather server to the outside location of the camera. I’m hoping to feel well enough this weekend to take care of that. Once cabled we will begin testing and playing with the camera functionality. Once we are comfertable the camera is operating correctly and can reliably product images we will include links on this website. I expect this project to take a few weeks to complete, so stayed tuned.

The electrical storm on Thursday night disabled our Davis console. This prevented accurate data to be collected by Ambient VWS software. Davis support ran us through performing a cold reset of the system. Since the cold reset, we are now recording rain and wind speed correctly.

Comparing our numbers to the area average we expect that we’ve missed recording over an inch of rain. We are researching how to correct our reports to reflect this missed rain.

The console was connected via AC adapter, which was believed to the source of the problem. We are now running the console on batteries only.  We will continue to monitor system performance and compare to our weather neighbors.

Castlerockweather.org’s internet connection was down for most of today. Our connection reliability is typically outstanding and reliable. We are now live and transmitting data up to the website and our affiliates.

Our website’s data should reflect data gathered during this outage. CWOP and WU are missing data during that period.

VWS moved to new server. Cannabilized old weather server to make a new gaming pc. New server still handling software no problem.

New APC 2200 “The Power Monster” will provide more then enough power when the weather gets exciting.