About This Station
The station is powered by a homebrew 1-Wire weather station I assembled from various sources, including a homemade Stephenson screen, commercial sensors (anenometer, rain gauge), and kits (temperature, humidity, pressure, lightning, and solar). The data is collected approximately every 3 seconds for real-time display and recorded once per minute in a database. This Web site is currently updated once every 5 minutes. The data is also published to the Weather Underground every 5 seconds, and to the Citizen's Weather Observer Program (CWOP) every 10 minutes. The station consists of an AAG Electronica V3.0 1-Wire anemometer, RainWise rain gauge converted to 1-Wire, Hobby Boards 1-Wire thermo-hygro sensor kit, Hobby Boards 1-Wire solar sensor kit, Hobby Boards lightning sensor kit, and Hobby Boards 1-Wire barometer kit. All sensors have been situated in the most optimal positions available in my yard to achieve the highest accuracy possible. However, accuracy is not guaranteed, as compromises were made during installation, and no important decisions should be based on the information obtained from this Web site.
About This Weather Station Software
This site's data is collected using software that I developed. The majority of the software runs on the Linux operating system. This portion of the software was developed using the Java programming language for portability between Linux and Windows as I develop on Windows but deploy to Linux. There is additional Windows client software that was developed using the C# programming language.
The software consists of the following components:
- The hardware data acquisition component that polls the 1-Wire weather hardware and publishes this information over a local area network (LAN) via TCP/IP. It also publishes data to the Weather Underground (station ID KMDGERMA9) and the Citizen's Weather Observer Program (CWOP call sign KB3HHA).
- The forecast retrieval component gathers NOAA weather data and forecasts once an hour via FTP for a specified local zone and county. This retrieved data is stored locally for display on the Web site.
- The data storage component gathers the weather data from the hardware data acquisition component once per minute and stores it in a MySQL database for later analysis and display on the Web site.
- The Web site builder component creates this Web site from a template using data supplied by all of the other components.
- The weather Web service which runs under Apache Tomcat and provides real-time weather data on a LAN.
- The Windows client software for the weather Web service.
These are the basic software components in place so far. Planned enhancements/additions include using Ajax to update portions of the Web site in a more timely fashion and providing weather data through the Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS) via radio.
About This Computer Hardware and Software
The software component for hardware data acquisition was originally targeted to run an a TINI microprocessor. This plan changed when a suitable computer became available for free. Hardware data acquisition, NOAA forecast retrieval, data storage and analysis, Web site creation, and weather Web service all run on an older discarded PC using Fedora Core Linux V6 along with various other open source software packages. This PC has a Pentium III 450 MHz processor, 256Mb RAM, and 15GB of disk storage. The database used for data storage and analysis is MySQL. The local Web server is Apache and the Web service is provided by Tomcat.
The Windows Web service client runs on several workstations connected to a LAN running Windows XP, both the home and professional versions. This client software uses the .NET Framework V2.0.
The WEB cam is a Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks. It is positioned in my computer room window and securely fastened with some high-tech 3M packing tape.
About This City (adapted from Wikipedia)
Germantown is an unincorporated but urbanized census-designated place in Montgomery County, Maryland in the USA. It is the sixth most populous CDP in Maryland. If it were to incorporate, it would be the second largest city in Maryland [1].
It is the only "Germantown, Maryland" recognized by the United States Postal Service, although there are technically three others, one each in Anne Arundel County, Baltimore County, and Worcester County. It has the assigned ZIP Codes of 20874 and 20876 for delivery and 20875 for post office boxes only.
In the 1830s and 1840s, a large number of German business owners, some of whom were immigrants from Germany and others relocating from Pennsylvania, settled near where what are now known as Liberty Mill Road and Clopper Road intersect. While most of the local landowners and farmers were English, travelers remembered the accents of the shop-owners and called the area Germantown. Germantown has experienced great growth during the past few years and an urbanized town center has been built.
Some Germantown trivia:
- Germantown has appeared in several episodes of The X-Files.
- George Atzerodt, a co-conspirator in the Abraham Lincoln assassination was captured in Germantown on April 20, 1865. He was assigned by John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson, but lost his nerve and fled Washington, D.C., on the night of the Lincoln assassination. He was captured at his cousin Frederick Richter's farm in Germantown. Atzerodt was hanged on July 7, 1865 along with Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, and David Herold in Washington, D.C. [1]
For much more detailed information about Germantown history, I recommend visiting the Germantown Historical Society Web site. They provide a detailed history of Germantown, a listing of historical sites, calendar of local events, and a sales catalog that includes several books about Germantown and the railroad that helped fuel the growth of Germantown.
About These Statistics
This software began collecting the statistics displayed on these pages on 06/27/2009 23:54:32. The weather station software was last started on 08/10/2009 20:59:13.
About This Website
This site is based on a template design by CarterLake.org. Special thanks also go to Kevin Reed at TNET Weather.
The original template is based on work by Designs by Haran.
This template is XHTML 1.0 compliant. Validate the XHTML and CSS of this page.