Yesterday, I’ve written about the 2 Fujitsu-Siemens Futros that I plan to use in my network environment. Today, I received the weather station which (as always – but this time in a very good way) changes the way it will work in future.

The station itself was put together quickly. There are 2 parts; one are the instruments that you can see above. It is equipped with a small solar panel which powers them. There is also a 2x AA battery slot (I guess for the night and darker days).

The second part is the station itself. It is a very handy touchscreen LCD panel with a USB port. A 2x USB A cable was in the package and so it was pretty easy to connect it to a PC.

Until I have time to mount the instruments at the shelter, I’ve put them into flower bed in the garden – for a test run.

Luckily, the weather station connects the instruments to the station wireless. This allows me to drop the idea to install one of the Futros into the shelter. I simply put my gateway into the living room which is in optical range to the instruments.

To grab the data, I use Steve’s perl script. It took some time to get it installed, but that was the “fault” of a wrong /etc/apt/sources.list file In the end, I was able to grab data from the station in a 10 seconds (or more often I really want) delay. This will allow me to write these data with a little cron job into a file on the fileserver and then grab this file from another VM and create a nice rrdtool graphic out of it – but this task will be done in (near) future

Here’s a screenshot of some data coming in.

I guess, now that I have one box unused, I will end up building a pfSense router with the Dual Port NIC + the onboard NIC for load balancing my two DSL lines