This site was created to share my hobby weather station to the city of Jacksonville Florida in case others will find the data useful as well. This weather site also allows me to experiment with various programming techniques and weather logging experiments.

A common question I get is "how do you do that"? This is actually fairly easy providing you have the time, hardware, software and most importantly the desire to do this.

Weather Sensors

It all boils down to getting a handful of sensors, or a "weather station" system. I purchased a Davis Vantage Pro2 weather station and the Davis Serial Weatherlink.

The serial Weatherlink hardware connects the Vantage Pro2 console unit to the server which controls all aspects of the site and weather logging. Davis offers several models of the Vantage Pro2, feel free to check out their site (link) and see what all they offer.

Server Hardware

The server that runs all the weather software and that the weatherlink is connected to is a HP DL360 G3 rackmount server.

The server has dual 3.06GHz processors and 4GB ECC RAM. There are 2 36GB 15K SCSI drives in a RAID 1 array that helps overcome a single drive failure. The machine runs Windows 2003 Server. The machine is administered using HP's integrated Lights Out (iLO - KVM over IP) interface.

The network that supports the server as well as my machines is a fully managed network powered by a HP Procurve 2524 switch with a 1gbit uplink to the other layer of the network.

The software that we use is, Weather Display, Weather Display Live, Apache, PHP 5, MySQL, Perl & Windows Server 2003.

Here are a list of major changes to the site over the last few years.

Oct 22, 2011 - Replaced "Ettin", Ettin is the machine that runs the software and hardware needed for the site
Jun 25, 2011 - Redone "About Us" page
Jun 16, 2011 - Reworked backend admin section
May 10, 2011 - Demo'd TV antenna mast, and started 40' triangular tower installation
Feb 2, 2011 - Happy 2nd birthday to MGCJerry Weather!
Oct 17, 2010 - Migrated to my own in-house CMS system
Feb 2, 2010 - Happy 1st birthday to MGCJerry Weather!
Aug 13, 2009 - Created weather signature script
Apr 20, 2009 - Installed TV antenna mast to 33'
Feb 2, 2009 - Site goes live using Saratoga/Carterlake Template System

Created: April 17, 2009
Lasted edited: October 31, 2011 (23:14)
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