[ale] Personal Weather Stations

[Greg Freemyer]

Okay Enthusiasts,

I'm new to weather stations, so tell me what I'm doing right/wrong.
Anyway these are my thoughts:

===

I bought my Dad a La Crosse weather station for his birthday so he can
monitor the weather at his 2nd house.  (He's using XP, but I want to
move this to a dedicated Linux machine.)

Using XP I configured his system to post to http://www.wxqa.com/ as
part of the "Citizen's Weather Observation Program" (CWOP) which I
think is connected to the world of Ham operators.  (that's a good
thing from my Dad's perspective).

That in turn is forwarded to findu.com so he can see the history on
that website.

And also the system is creating a current conditions image and FTPing
it up to a webserver.

I'm  considering leaving it as it is.  but this is Winblows so far and
I bet it will be a big hassle to keep running.

So what I need to replace is:

1) USB / serial port driver.  (ie. the La Crosse weather console has a
serial port, but at least currently I have that connected to a
serial2usb adaptor that came with it.)

2) Software to read the serial (usb) data and show the current
conditions on the screen.

3) Software to grab a copy of the current conditions and post that to
a webserver in a nicely formatted view.

4.) Software to post a copy of the current conditions to the cwop
servers so findu.com can display it.

And I'm thinking of doing all of this on an old laptop, so it can be a
small dedicated out of the way machine.

Any advice out there.

Thanks
Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer
Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist
http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer
First 99 Days Litigation White Paper -
http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf

The Norcross Group
The Intersection of Evidence & Technology
http://www.norcrossgroup.com