Just another little side project...

berry120

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...if anyone's interested in what I'm up to.

I should really stop procrastinating though...

If anyone knows any weather prediction algorithms beyond "if the pressure drops a bit then it might rain, if it drops a lot it's probably stormy and if the temperature is below 0 the rain will actually be snow" I'd be interested in your thoughts!

The "station" itself is a piece of veroboard with a relatively simple circuit containing a few sensors and an atmega328 (there is a humidity sensor there as well, but it seems to have failed for some reason. Another (better) one is in the post.) Sits outside my bedroom window, and sends a packet of data out to the PC every few seconds which records it and pushes the changes out to any connected web clients (no refreshes, AJAX of course, we are almost in 2013 after all.)

Why, I hear you ask? Because I can... ;)
 
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Dude is that hosted on your PC? You may want to get that out elsewhere, considering it's a relatively basic site it takes a long old time to load like 10 - 15 seconds long.
 
Dude is that hosted on your PC? You may want to get that out elsewhere, considering it's a relatively basic site it takes a long old time to load like 10 - 15 seconds long.

Yeah, welcome to your average UK home broadband connection. Seems simple but there's actually quite a lot of sensor data pushed out at startup to populate the graphs over the last 48 hours, which is probably the cause for the delay. If I get a chance I'll put a little loading screen in there, but can't really do a lot else considering it's pulling data back from the station attached to the PC it's running on!

...Well, I lie, I could push the data up to an external server on the fly and then use that to push the data to clients, but for now that's pretty overkill. Depending on how far this project goes, I could do that at some point (it'd just be quite a lot of work and expense considering the scale of the project!
 
I'd personally just do a quick Multi Thread for a welcome message and a "graph will load shortly" message or something. 10 - 15 seconds is a long time to wait for a web site to load in this day and age.

Who's your ISP i get around 2mb Upload with SKY at the minute which is enough to host a basic website.
 
I'd personally just do a quick Multi Thread for a welcome message and a "graph will load shortly" message or something. 10 - 15 seconds is a long time to wait for a web site to load in this day and age.

Who's your ISP i get around 2mb Upload with SKY at the minute which is enough to host a basic website.

Meh, I may do - as I said though, it's a little side project nothing more at the moment, so I'll see if I get time. We're with Sky as well, but the problem isn't the static page, it's the relatively large amount of data that has to be sent on startup to populate 48 hours worth of data. The resolution is every 10 minutes or so, so that's a lot of data flying over the wire bearing in mind there's also various others connected at the moment as well. I could turn the resolution down of course, but I like my detailed graphs ;)
 
ok ok.

Now for some good news, i like it!
Not that i imagine that means much to you. But the concept / principal and yeah you are right the detailed graphs with the tiny plot points are awesome.

You should have some scale optios, so you can choose every 10 minutes or every hour or daily etc?

Unfortunately i have nothing more productive to add in terms of weather algorithms and predictions :(

is there a reason you didnt put the @ sign in your email address?
 
ok ok.

Now for some good news, i like it!
Not that i imagine that means much to you. But the concept / principal and yeah you are right the detailed graphs with the tiny plot points are awesome.

Actually, it does mean a lot when people like the random stuff I come up with ;)

You should have some scale optios, so you can choose every 10 minutes or every hour or daily etc?
Yeah, agreed - mainly set up the way it is at the moment for simplicity, but more options like that would be better. (Thinking of giving people the option of different units too.)

Unfortunately i have nothing more productive to add in terms of weather algorithms and predictions :(
No worries, it was a long shot as to whether anyone did!

is there a reason you didnt put the @ sign in your email address?
Habit really, used to do it all the time to reduce the chance of it getting collected by automated spam bots at least...! Not sure it makes much different now, and I'm flooded with so much of the stuff anyway...!
 
What are you using to generate those graphs?

We use Telerik at my work which is awesome but the licenses can be rather expensive and i've been looking for a cheaper alternative for my home use.
 
Looks interesting but I have a question about the light level. It seems the light level is highest at night and lowest during the day. For instance, at this point in time it shows that it started getting light at 10:27pm and got dark at 9:40am. Assuming that you didn't make an error on your graph, that must mean that the time on the graph refers to my local time (I'm in the US)?
 
What are you using to generate those graphs?

We use Telerik at my work which is awesome but the licenses can be rather expensive and i've been looking for a cheaper alternative for my home use.

Google charts: https://developers.google.com/chart/
It's the best all round one I've found to be honest, the other one that I'd consider is Fusion Charts (paid product but offers a free version) which looks better IMO, but the free version unfortunately only produces flash based charts.

Looks interesting but I have a question about the light level. It seems the light level is highest at night and lowest during the day. For instance, at this point in time it shows that it started getting light at 10:27pm and got dark at 9:40am. Assuming that you didn't make an error on your graph, that must mean that the time on the graph refers to my local time (I'm in the US)?

That is interesting - it works fine for me and uses the times I'd expect, so I can only assume the charting library is trying to do something clever and converting it into your local time, yup (in which case the GMT bit on the label will be wrong!)
 
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