Equipment and Software

Equipment:

Davis Instruments Vantanage Pro 2 Wireless Weather Station and Integrated Sensor Suite

  • Weather Station Console (receives data from sensors, processes, and displays data. Also contains barometer.)
  • Integrated Sensor Suite (ISS):
    • Includes rain collector/self-tipping rain bucket, temperature and humidity sensors, anemometer, and solar panel (the suite is solar-powered with a battery backup). Electronic components are housed in a weather-resistant shelter. Temp and humidity sensors are housed in a radiation shield to deflect effects of direct sunshine and reflected radiant heat from land surfaces. Data is transmitted wirelessly from the ISS to the station console in 1-3 second intervals. Wireless range is up to 1000' (300 m) outdoors, line of sight.
  • NIST Certification Standards for Sensor Equipment:
    • Anemometer - ± 5% at 6, 12, 25, 40, and 75 mph; Additional Wind Speed Points ± 5%
    • Barometer - ± 0.05" Hg (± 1.3 mm Hg, 1.7 mb, or 1.7 hPa)
    • Outside Humidity: ± 3%
    • Outside Temperature: ±1°F at 0, 40, and 80°F (±0.5°C at -18, 4, and 27° C); ±2° F at -40, -15, and 140°F (±1.0°C at -40, -26, and 60° C)
    • Rain Collector/Self-tipping Bucket: ± 4% plus one tip (0.01")

USB Data Logger for Davis VP Stations

  • Logs and transmitts data between Weather Station Console and PC
  • USB Port Accessibility

Gateway 9300 Solo Laptop Computer

  • Runs Weather Display software; responsible for data storage, publication, and local display
  • Specifications:
    • Pentium III Processor, 696 MHz
    • 288 MB Usable RAM
    • Windows XP Pro 2002, Service Pack 2
    • 6 GB Hard Disk Storage
    • Secured LAN connection - High Speed Ethernet and Wireless Connections to LAN and Broadband Internet
  • Dedicated Machine (used only to run Weather Display functions)

Dell Dimension 4700 Desktop

  • Used as backup - Also used to run editing programs and maintenance remotely via LAN (i.e. Dreamweaver MX)
  • Specifications:
    • Pentium IV Processor, 2.8 GHz
    • 504 MB Usable RAM
    • Windows XP Pro 2002, Service Pack 2
    • 70 GB Hard Disk Storage
    • Secured LAN connection - High Speed Ethernet Connection to LAN and Broadband Internet

Jensen MR-600 Weather Alert Radio

  • Tunes in NOAA Weather Radio for rebroadcast over our dedicated audio stream provided by WeatherUndergound

Software:

Weather Display, by Brian Hamilton

This program is the heart-and-soul of lakevilleweather.com. Program downloads, logs, and displays weather data in virtually any format possible through user specification. Through custom data tagging, web content and display pages are produced by Weather Display, and then uploaded to the internet. Other features include real time, auto scale, and historical graphing, FTP of the weather data to remote servers, pager and email notifications of extreme conditions, web download, Metar/ Synop emails, averages/extreme/climate/NOAA reports, web cam upload, grouped file uploads, FTP downloads, decoded metar downlaod's, APRS output (internet and direct com port as well) ,WAP, direct web cam capture, animated web cam images, weatherdials, weather voice, weather answer phone, and direct interface with several weather publication services like Weather Underground, Weather for You, CWOP, NOAA, Ham Weather, etc.

Movable Type, by Six Apart, Ltd.

Movable Type is a professional-grade blogging platform, which we use as a server-side publishing agent for all web content. Although the Lakeville Weather Journal is the only "blog" published via lakevilleweather.com, the Movable Type platform allows unlimited flexibility in modular plug-n-play type HTML and PHP- based web publishing. All pages on this website are published dynamically through PHP technology, allowing the most current data to be displayed upon page view.

Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks, by Adobe Systems, Inc.

Undoubtedly the most powerful and popular web content editing software and web graphics editor available.

Flash FXP, by iniCom Networks, Inc.

Versitile FTP software, well vetted for performance, connectivity, and a user-friendly interface.

OddcastV3, from Oddsock.org

Freeware audio encoding and streaming utility.

Soundmanager2, by Scott Schiller

Freeware AJAX script used to load and manage audio effects on websites. We use it to play the NOAA Weather Radio stream.

General PHP, AJAX and JavaScript Coding

Several people are in need of credit for their contributions to the development of weather website technology. You will see their names repeated on several sites, forums, and resources for weather website developers. As mentioned above, Brian Hamilton's Weather Display software truly is at the heart of our site. The program pumps out a raw-data file every three seconds and uploads it to our webserver. From there, Kevin Reed at TNET Services developed PHP code that parsed the data from Weather Display. Tom Chapin of CarterLake.org and "Pinto", a weather-watch member from Belgium, collaborated to develop AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) scripts that kept the data "live" by refreshing dynamic elements like temp, wind, humidity, etc. Ken True at Saratoga Weather polished up, simplified, and enhanced the scripts and we use Ken's scripting here with some minor tweaks for lakevilleweather.com customization.