Getting back to running a weather station

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?

I’m not overly worried about speed. It’s going to sit in a corner processing weather data and I won’t be using it as an end-user device. As long as it can update my web site and run WxSIM in a reasonable timescale then that’s fine.

Remember, the OS uses free space as memory too, the less free space you have will slow down the machine

Yeah, I would go for 256 at least.

Here are Celeron J1800 running W7 + WD + WXSIM just fine. WXSIM runs in ca 2 minutes for 5 days. Powerusage ca 9 watt with 4G RAM and 64 GB SSD. :smiley:

I have a 320GB HDD in mine (which was what I was using in the laptop). It currently uses about 40GB for the C drive which has the WD program directory on it, and about 110GB on the D drive which houses maily several years worth of WD log files and all my WXSim stuff again for quite a few years.

Stuart