I'm curious

Hi Brian,

If it’s not to personal, how did you end up as a dairy farmer, weather watcher and software writer ? I can see the connection between farming and weather but where did software coding sneak in there ? Where did you learn Delphi ?

Boy am I nosey tonight.

He’s got Kalifornya experience too! :smiley:

Well, it all started when my brother and i (my brother is a programer full time (workd from home, connected to a pc in europe via the internet and wroks with main frame pc’s, and makes a killing too)
got a VIC 20 computer, when they first came out (after a freind got a ZX81). This is like 23 years ago or so.
We would write games, in BASIC.
Then we got a Commodore 64
Now, my dad was a dairy farmer, its a family farm, and he loves the weather too. So we had a Maximum vigilant anenometer…i.e voltage needle display system.
We built a wind direction from a V8 distributor, and hooked that up to some relay switches, and connected that to the commodoe 64’s game port, and got wind direction on the PC, as well as on a dial with LED’s.
Then i thouht, hey, i will connect the anenometer, the cable from the generator, to the pc, to read as a POT.
It sort of worked, but the voltage induced from the eletric fence running in parallel to the anenometer cable would make the PC screen dsiplay flash every second, until, no more pc sreen display :frowning:
So, i swtich the aneometer to a reed switch, and then started polling the output, and plotting/graphing, in a program, with my brothers help. That was around 18 years ago.
Then we transfered it to a IBM type PC, and rewrite it in turbo pascal, as a DOS program, and hooked in temperature, from a thermistor, and a rain gauge, and humidity. That was the birth of the DOS wind program, which is still there on the wd site.
Then I was asked to get data from a WM918 when they first came out , onto a web site, for some paragliders. At the same time, VWS was just beign born too.
In the mean time I had been to uni, then cam home to milk cows and then got married and have 3 kids later (and now have lots of grey hair)