Sep 3 2009
New on-line weather station
Purchased from Martin Lynch & Sons recently was their new WX-831 weather station. On paper, this seems to be an excellent deal as it is priced at just £99 and includes a cup-style anenometer for measuring wind speed, as opposed to the propeller driven device on my current W2300 station which appears to have seized (it were never very accurate anyway). But what software works with this unit to upload current and historic data to the live weather station on my web site?
The WX-831 is actually a Ventus W831 and is shipped with Weather Capture v1.0 software. This software is fine for downloading the data from the station controller and displaying and graphing it on the PC, but it has no facility to upload this data to a web site. My old W2300 device had a crude web site interface, but any serious weather reporting needed additional software. I chose Weather Display and Weather Display Live to give a professional looking ‘live’ weather report from my location on my web site. This proved to be successful, but for the W2300 eating batteries like they were going out of fashion causing the ‘live’ reporting to be dead for many days at a time until the batteries could be replaced.
I was unable to confirm that the Weather Display software would work with my new W831 before purchasing it since it was an impulse buy whilst in their showroom, some 250 miles from my home, purchasing a transceiver for my new car so I had to research what web software would work with it when I got home. Searching for Ventus W831 weather software yeiled few useful results, but after much digging I was able to ascertain that my weather station was actually a Honeywell TE821W/831W and that it behaved, control-wise, in the same way as a Honeywell TE923W. Bingo, the Weather Display software supports this unit. I was also able to download manuals for the Weather Capture software from the Honeywell site, together with an upgrade to version 1.1. Furthermore, the Honeywell site confirms that the following third-party weather station software is also compatible with their units:
So, I now have a new weather station ready to be installed – all I need now is some free time? Wonder where you buy that from?
Jul 05, 2010 @ 22:49:02
The weather station is now live on the Internet, having gone through a protracted period of private testing. You can view it on my Weather (Current) page on the menu at the top of this page.
So far, so good.
Jan 06, 2010 @ 16:42:06
Sorted. Turned out to be an update to my version of AVS did not like WeatherCapture Advance because it has no digi signature.
£$%^&*
I should have realised.
Jan 06, 2010 @ 00:15:56
Yeah, running XP here too.
I’m using the Weather Display software since the software since I had this with my previous station. I think for all its faults, my previous station from Waters & Stanton was a better unit. Problem was it had a propeller wind unit ans these are not as good as cupped units.
However, the temp of the new unit seems a bit out, but the pressure problem can be adjusted for – no weather station will read the correct pressure out of the box, it needs to be adjusted since height and other geographic and environmental features can affect the local pressure.
I’m hoping to spend a bit of time with it the weekend after next to finally get it working properly. I’ll post my results on here.
Jan 05, 2010 @ 17:01:42
I am running XP Home with SP3.
Have had the unit since October only just getting round to installing software and am a bit miffed about the accuracy of the temperature, the wind speed has not registered above 4mph although the windmill is in the open and the barometric pressure is a mile off. Ventus say adjust the altitude!
All in all not the “Near Professional” station advertised. I should have asked ML&S how near is near.
Jan 05, 2010 @ 14:15:52
Well it took a while, but the station’s working at the moment. Had to get a new temperature sensor from ML & S and it still took a great deal of time and effort to position it so that connected wirelessly to the main unit.
Using the new software mentioned in my blog I have had no problems getting the data to the computer, but I am currently trying to get it working with third-party software so that I can go on-line with the data. That’s going to be the subject of another blog at some time.
I wonder what version of Windows M0AWI is using?
Jan 05, 2010 @ 13:42:51
I also purchased from Martin Lynch & Sons recently a new WX-831 weather station.
Cannot get it to work though, get this error message.
“Unable to create file C:\………WeatherStationInterface.exe
CreateProcess failed code 5
Access is denied”
In a normmal Windows message window.
Any ideas how to get round this please.
Dec 12, 2009 @ 19:23:40
Hi there – how are you finding the weather station? I have just bought one. It seems well mode though the temperature reading from the wind chill sensor seems about 2 degrees out. I am a bit disappointed in the software aswell. Its odd that it has to be connected to the unit to function. I would like to keep long term records on my PC but this software will presumably only show as much data as the unit can hold (200 records – whatever that is).
I have downloaded trials of the other compatible software but am not getting great results so far.
Cheers
Andy