La Crosse WS23xx - Sensor cabling information

Hardware Weather Station Siting and Setup Tips
1

I was reading many different threads about cable extensions, replacement with sheilded/cat5 cable etc… now I can’t find the one I was going to reply to! #-o

Anyway here is some technical info that may be useful to people modifying their anemometer cabling for starters…

The four wires have the following function… ( looking at the anemometer plug, cable towards you, pins up, left to right )

Pin 1 (left) : Common (ground) - This connects to the battery -VE in the temp/hum., this is what any new cable shield should connect to.

Pin2: Anemometer power enable - This is the control line that when pulled to GND by the temp/hum module fully powers up the anemometer and causes its latest reading data to be sent back.

Pin3: Permanent power to the anemometer - continuously fed from battery or base V+

Pin 4 (right) : Serial data line from the anemometer to the temp/hum

In my unit the wire colours 1 - 4 are yellow, green, red, black, but this could be different in other units.

I had 30 metres of sheilded security alarm type cable running for a few years with no problems so extensions to at least this length should be fine!

If using cat5 cable use one colour for each of the enable/power/serial data pins 2,3,4 and connect all the others together to Pin 1, this should give best interference rejection…

Hope that may be of help to anyone doing mods :slight_smile: I have the old station here and am quite happy to do any reverse engineering that may satisfy someones curiosity and mine!

2

Hello,
A french guy created this page, with an image. Does it illustrate well what you explain?
http://hautil.free.fr/meteo/metws2300.htm

3

That illustration is for the station to computer serial cable, I was talking about the wind sensor cable that some people are extending or changing to sheilded cable…

4

oops, sorry :oops:

5

Hi Ricky,

If doing the modification to the cable from the sensor only, do you know if i would need to do an additional modification if using an extra cable extention?

Also, i found a webpage that do show how to do it, with illustrations:

http://www.lavrsen.dk/sources/weather/windmod.htm

Arnt

6

Arnt - that’s the original one I was referring to earlier that La Crosse staff pointed me to. Thanks - saved me doing a search through my earlier posts… :wink:

Graeme

Thanks to Ricky who originally sorted out diagnosing the problem and the resolution...

Thanks Windy - all in one place now :wink:

7

just to note that Mr Lavrsen discovered the problem only after I had emailed him and told him that Ricky had discovered the problem and the solution.
I.e Ricky is the original person to discover the fix :wink:
(that has never been acknowledged, but I like to remind people, LOL)

8

Many thanks! When I get fed up with watching my wind vane spinning around in the turbulence from my garden wall, I’ll have a go at that mod so I can route a nice long cable up to my TV aerial pole. I’ve just bought the crimp tool and some connectors from Maplins so there’s not much else I’ll need except the cable.

If any of you run linux and have a web-cam, have a look at Kenneth Lavrsen’s ‘motion’ sofware too - it’s really good for grabbing frames from webcams, making little movies from them and so on. I used it for a while to make little films of what our cats got up to while we were out, but it could equally be used to do time-lapse movies of the days weather and so on. Unfortunately where I live there’s nowhere I could point a camera without risking the neighbours complaining otherwise I’d set something up to demonstrate.

9

have you seen WD’s movie maker from a web cam?
(see my web site for examples) :wink:
(not the same thing, but simlar)

10

I haven’t yet, no, but thank you for mentioning it. Long story, but my weather station - PC link is out of action for a week or two at the moment.