The Station was built originally from a scrapped Davis Weather Monitor II, which I was given in 2006. The Console and Datalogger were in working order, however the Rain Gauge was missing, the cables were all cut and required to be re-joined. The Wind speed unit was missing a cup, which was epoxy resin glued back on.

The Davis Station is believed to have been originally from http://www.bridford.metsite.com , which quotes that it was first deployed in 1992, making the equipment at this site 15 years old !! I think this shows you get what you pay for with weather recording equipment !! I shall be buying a Davis when this one finally fails in a way that I cannot fix.

Following the work needed to make the system usable, the station was connected to a server using Weather Display and was commissioned on April 1st 2006.

After a few months, the station was made more robust with the addition of a UPS, and server remote control.

The first Ottery St Mary Weather Station Website.

In September 2007, the Server was virtualised into the main server using VMware. This increased the reliablilty of the service and provided more processing power on-tap.

This server hardware consisted of an Intel Core Duo E6550 Processor on an MSI mobo. 4 Gig of RAM is required to enable the use of VMWare Server to virtualise the Weather server. 2 x 500Gb SATA drives, Mirrored (RAID 1) to provide storage.

The previous server hardware (April 2006-Feb 2007) was a Dual Pentium II 233Mhz with 512Mb RAM, and then (Feb 2007 - Oct 2007) a Pentium III 655Mhz with 256Mb RAM.

In February 2009, this was changed to a Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 Processor, 64-bit Ubuntu Linux based Server, with 4Gb RAM, and 2 x 500Gb SATA drives, Mirrored (RAID 1), to provide more processing power, and allow application platform changes. We have moved to 64-bit Linux to support higher levels of RAM needed for future expansion of the systems used to forecast, and record weather data.

The Ottery st Mary Weather Station is totally automated, by design. Scheduling tools and scripting is used to collect data, interpret and model, and create web content.

Internet Services are provided by Zen Internet - www.zen.co.uk

1-wire equipment using Hobby Boards pre-made circuits, and home designed sensors are used for supplementary data points.

Forecasting software used is WXSIM, which has been configured for the location by the software's author. Forecasting data is taken from local METAR and actual Weather Station data.

This site is published using the Joomla CMS framework, which enables the site to be easily updated and provide a searchable and configurable platform that is easy to maintain, leaving more time to develop the statistical aspects of the site, instead of the actual display of data.

Twitter Script

We do not use the WDisplay Twitter function, as I developed a CuRL based PHP script to upload to Twitter before the function was available in WD. This script makes use of the Twitter API, and currently does not handle any error conditons fed back from the API however there are plans to enable re-sending of tweets if they are not accepted, and auto-delete of tweets over 1 month old, and summary tweets per month.

Station Updates :