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.

I created a “gotmoon.htx” and have added it to the HTML settings of VWS. VWS produces both a *.txt and *.htm file. I’ve included ^moon_percent^ and a few other tag just to show its working. I enclosed the result of the tag in between |*| so I know if a “space or blank” is being produced. My ftp uploader is updating these files every 2 minutes on my website.

The ^moon_percent^ html tag in VWS requires the broadcast display to be displayed on the desktop. For those who don’t use the broadcast image on their website, apparently in generating this image vws also performs the calculations required to calculate the moon %. It records that value in ^moon_percent^ html tag. Since I don’t use the broadcast image, but I want the html tag to be claculated, I’ve unchecked “create JPG File”, but will leave the broadcast display running.

This wasn’t a common issue, and most people leave the default/all images running on the display. This explains why it appeared everyone else worked but me. That will teach me for hiding unused items from my desktop.

Castlerockweather.Org’s landing page has been upgraded to use dynamic AJAX scripting.

AJAX can be used to update your conditions webpage between regular update times without reloading the entire page in the browser. It does require a ‘modern’ browser, and that JavaScript be enabled in the browser. This script and template set allows you to use a capability of VWS software to frequently update a small pair of data files associated with Weather Flash: wflash.txt and wflash2.txt.

In these files, the current conditions values are set in comma-delimited format. While the format of these files is undocumented by the developers, thanks to the work of Matt at weatherbus.com and Ken at saratoga-weather.org.

The table was reversed engineered from both the WD and VWS AJAX scripts/demos/and templates, which can be found at AJAX Weather-Display with PHP Demo and AJAX VWS / Weather Flash HTML Templates.

We’re not complete, but have done enough to go live with the new design. I hope you find this page more useful then before. Enjoy.

We are now providing Weather Graphics for others to use on their websites. These graphics are sometimes called “Weather Stickers.” Ours are available on our website free of charge. Please check them out at http://www.castlerockweather.org/weathergraphics.php

Here is an example:

I’ve got weather flash loaded on castlerockweather.org, but the demo software does not appear to be working. I’ve also got a small FTP upload issue that I’m trying to solve. WxFlash requires FTP uploads every 5-20 seconds. This ties up my available 2 connections and causes other content to fail. At this point I’ve changed the upload path for the AJAX scripts to work, but at some point I will have to change it back.

We used to use a combination of data.csv and getraw.php. This method worked well, but lacked the ability to update the value, without reloading the whole page. After reading the Seratoga Weather’s AJAX script pages, decoding the scripts and templates, and some playing around with test pages, we were able to upgrade our site with the new content.

I wanted to thank Seratoga Weather again for their contributions to the personal weather station website community. For more information about using AJAX scripts with VWS please check out the following link: http://saratoga-weather.org/scripts-VWS-AJAX.php#VWSajaxwf

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.

Virtual Weather Station today recorded its 365 day of data.

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.