Getting back to running a weather station

After too many years of not being able to run a station I’m starting to get to the point where it’s feasible again. I’ve still got my (now aged) Davis station but parts of that are bolted to the roof and walls of another house and whilst I will get them down at some point it’s not going to happen for a while. Assuming I can still find all the bits I suspect that the system will need a fair bit of maintenance too before it will work reliably.

So in the interim I’m getting a Bloomsky (Sky2 + Storm) station (please don’t moan at me!). The intention being that I’ll use this until I get the Davis back up and running and then move it to another location about a mile away as a second system. I’ve got the Sky2 module and I’m just waiting for the Storm module and tripod stand to be delivered.

So that’s step 1 underway. Another change since my last station is that I no longer have a PC running 247 in the house. I tend to use my tablet/phone and only break out the PC or laptop when I need more oomph for whatever I’m doing…which seems to be about every couple of weeks at the moment. So I was wondering about putting a low power PC in just to effectively do 247 weather stuff, e.g. running WD and WxSIM. I’m way out of date on specs though. What kind of spec of PC would I need? I know you can get WD running on a Raspberry Pi, but that’s a bit too minimal. If I wanted to run Win10, what spec of CPU, RAM, disk would I need? I’m thinking of something like a small mini-PC/cube device that sits in a corner using WiFi to do it’s thing without a keyboard, mouse, monitor connected, so I’d do most of the work on it by RDP.

Any info, or even suggestions of suitable devices (available in the UK) would be very welcome.

Thanks in advance,
Chris

Can I laugh?

Seriously, this is all good news :smiley:

Least its not a netamo… :lol:

I am running an old dual cor Pentium E2220 @ 2.4ghz with 4gb ram and a 300gb hdd
That is running 2 x wd + webcamcapture on 1 and wxsim and its working fine,
it also runs a macro every 30 mins to open note pad, copy the info and close it, then
opens Chrome and pastes the info.

That runs 24hrs with no problems at all, 4gb i feel is minimum nowadays if ya dont want
much lagging…

I suspected you might do :wink: It remains to be seen how well it works when I get it installed. I’m impressed by the build quality of the Sky2 module, it’s very sturdy and feels like a quality unit.

Amen to that :lol:

I’m still using a low power/capability Atom D525 board with an Intel SSD to run WD and some scripts. If you aren’t running anything heavy duty besides WD then any CPU with a rating higher than the D525’s 701 on the Passmark list will do the job. Next it’s a budget issue, at the high end Intel NUC or similar, at the low end no-name mini box from Asia.

I’ve got a Netatmo too :wink: That’s more to link in with the thermostat. It does seem to give realistic readings compared to other local stations, but I have seen some ridiculous values coming out of some. I suspect some are badly positioned and others may have the external temperature sensor indoors! So possibly not so much a problem with the devices and more about the users?

I guess that’s a ‘normal’ sized PC? I’m hoping to find something smaller, low-ish power and therefore possibly no-fan and silent (so maybe SSD). Anyway you’ve provided one marker in the sand - dual-core 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM and 300GB HDD. How low can I go?!?!

I’ve got a low-end mini box from Asia (running Linux) but they’re really only intended to be used as TV media boxes. They’re pretty locked down in terms of making changes to the OS and not even really patchable for security updates unless the supplier released an updated image. I suspect the Windows versions are much the same.

Yeh it is, ido you not have a shed ya can set it up in then its out the way? just need a eco PSU and jobs a goodun :slight_smile:

I used to think the same but Devil demonstrated that it isn’t so in this thread.

I now run mine on a GigaByte Brix GB-BXBT-1900 currently using W7 but I am sure it runs W10 although from what I’ve read may need a BIOS update if not on the latest. It runs WD and WXSim and I do use it for the odd bit of net surfing. It also runs DSLStats to monitor my router. Sits silently in the corner not using a whole load of leccy! Not hugely expensive I think they are still about

WD does support bloom sky as a weather station now
and WD will run OK on a low spec net pc (that is what I use :wink: )

Thanks for that. I’d seen those but dismissed them as only having a Celeron. I’ve not really tracked Celeron (too low spec for anything we’d use at work) so I didn’t realise that the J1900 was 4 core.

I feel Intel has really confused us old folks with their current use of the Celeron name :lol:

Yes, but there’s no leccy in it, not even low power :frowning:

Not helped by the fact that this old’un is spending far more of my time at work doing cyber-security rather than enterprise architecture.

Take a look at the Intel NUC.
They are small, low power and can run most anything.
I’ve got two; one running Win10 and the other Win7.

Thanks for that. I’ve seen some of these and had wondered if they’d do the job.

May not all be fanless.

It#s not blisteringly fast but perfectly adequate for what I need. A run of WXSim autolearn doing quite a lot of comparisons takes about 10-15 minutes elapsed but does not stop me from doing other stuff. I have been pleasantly surprised.

I now have my old i5 laptop back now fixed with new cpu fan, minus the piece of brass which was floating about inside and causing all sorts of crashes, running other stuff :wink:

Stuart

OK…exploring further…how big a HDD is really needed for WD and WxSIM these days? I’d like to use an SSD (less power and noise). W10 needs about 32GB. I’m guessing a 128GB SSD would probably give enough space to install/use for data?