I'm using a cheap and cheerful USB weather station that I bought via Ebay. The weather station end connects wirelessly to the touch-screen base station which also has a USB socket allowing it to be connected to a PC.

It all runs rather well except that the PC software supplied with it, Easy Weather, seems a bit flaky.

I've tried WDisplay to link it to one of my websites but this software appears to be very resource hungry so I'm going to write my own using VBScript.

I've worked out what most of the fields are in the EasyWeather.dat file but wondered if anyone knew of a complete file spec.?

The Watson and EasyWeather are rather new phenomena here, and there have been lots of queries since Krimble when it seems to have been released in the wild !

You are obviously computer savvy and may end as techie lead on the Watson !

I have a question for you !

Do you know if EasyWeather produces a 'plain English' current conditions file (could be .dat / .lst / .txt / .csv etc.)

PS. most of the Weather Sofwares are resource hungry for some strange reason.

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This one's badged "Elecsa" but I gather it's the same beast as the Watson plus a few other names, yes.

Not that I've been able to work out so far; just the CSV formatted .dat file. The LCD base station shows a simple 'current conditions' icon but whether that gets translated into the CSV file or not I've not worked out yet. There are only three values left that I haven't pinned down yet: 19, 20 and 21. I'll be analysing these a bit more over the coming days.

I suppose the resource issue crops up because developers keep cramming more and more functionality into the main application, instead of shelling it out to sub-apps, plus encapsulating their own ftp client into the bargain.

I'm primarily interested in getting my readings on-line so will be coding primarily for a text output initially. If I set up a timed event to construct the data locally I can use another timed event to ftp it to the website. Server-side stuff will take care of turning this into a webpage.

OK the first incarnation is online now. I found version 1 of Easy Weather to be much more stable that version 2 so I'm using that to read the data from the station, and a nifty little utility called AutoFTP to upload the EasyWeather.dat file to the website every ten minutes or so.

Once it gets to the website a chunk of simple VB Script takes it, reads it, and presents it on-line.

I'll put a new message in the Members Weather Stations section with the website address in it.

You might find the project section useful for any development on your ideas.

http://www.midlandsweather.org.uk/project.php

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Thanks, do I need special permission or something to get in there? The site won't let me in at the moment.

You need to reach a set criteria to get access normally - based on post level and membership time for an automatic promotion. I've manually updated your access levels for now.

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Hi Grant and Ambriel

Grant, As you might remember, I'm a Watson W-8681 owner as well, so could I have a look at your project section, please, having as yet insufficient privelege.
Ambriel - have you worked out how Easy Weather stores and calculates rainfall? - I tried all sorts of experiments a few weeks ago when I moved my weather station without taking out the batteries and accidentally shook quite a bit of pseudo rain into it! I searched the .dat file and edited the various rain totals, and reset the base unit, but I could not make it forget the pseudo rain. Since then, we've had plenty of real rain, so the pseudo has become insignificant, so its not really an issue now. If you have competed your understanding of the file, I would like to compare notes. You also mentioned two versions of the EasyWeather software - I have only found one - version 2.0. It has previously been reported on this site (by Thermocline) that this shows a memory leak when left running in order to produce the file for the web software to use, so, so far I havn't tried setting up for web serving.
best regards
Deneb2

Done

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Yes, I've found it to be a bit odd with historic rainfall. Haven't got a solution to that yet but it isn't an issue for me as I'm only really interested in current conditions.

I found a version 1.0 on a website that I've installed and which seems much more stable.

You can download it with this link: http://www.lacrossetechnology.co.nz/...tup_WS1081.zip

Yes, a memory leak seems likely. Version 2.0 definitely doesn't like being left running for too long.

The way I've setup my system is that I use a Windows version of the Unix TAIL command to copy the last 25 lines or so from the EasyWeather.dat file into a file of my own. This was because the EasyWeather.dat file rapidly becomes rather large. I then use a scheduled ftp task to upload this new file to my website. VB Script on the website then interrogates the uploaded file and generates the display.