Recent Experience with Labjack U3 and EI1050 Temp/Hum Probe?

Hi All,

Has anyone had recent experience with adding an extra temperature and humidity probe to Weather Display using the U3 and EI1050? I’m considering adding this to my station. A search didn’t reveal any recent posts. I’d be interested in hearing how it worked for you, does the U3 work ok with Weather Display, and the proper settings in the Labjack settings in WD.

Thanks!

Ron AD7L
Hillsboro, OR

Hi Ron,

My experience with the EI1050 temp/hum probe is not exactly what you are looking for, but I thought I would tell you how I got on with it. First of all, my main weather system is an Instromet system, and even though WD is supposed to work with it, I found it was not that successful. The main problem was missing counts of the rain gauge and Niko kindly helped me to convert my system to a stationless system. WD’s Brian was also helpful.This was made to work by creating my own clientraw.txt file and feeding it into WD directly. One other problem with the Instromet system at that time (at least 10 years ago) was that the temperature probe/humidity system on the Instromet were not that accurate.

So I bought an EI1050 probe and generated a Visual Basic program which automatically read the temperature and humidity from the probe every 10 seconds. Getting the Labjack U3 to work with VB was not a trivial operation, but once I managed to get them going, I have had good results since. Having the Labjack controlled by a VB routine makes it easy to add other devices (for example an IR sensor) and all the parameters are fed to my own clientraw.txt file which is read by WD twice a second. In this mode, WD also generates it’s own clientraw.txt file which makes it easy when you require to operate WDlive and some other programs.

The other parameters (wind speed and direction, rainfall, sunshine hours, barometer) are all added to the first clientraw.txt by another VB program which has a routine that writes the data twice a second. This program was developed in conjunction with a friend of mine who lives in London, who had much more software experience than I had. The whole system has proved pretty reliable over the years. The Instromet weather station has proved to be very reliable (apart from the original temp/hum measuring system which used a wet/dry thermometer arrangement) and I am still using it to this day. Have a look at my website:
http://sidlawweather.co.uk
and you will see that it still works after all these years. I use jpgraphs for the graphs on this system.
I realise that this is not exactly what you were asking about, in that you wanted a direct connection of the Labjack U3 to WD, but at the time, it was suggested by some on this Forum that it was not that easy to get it working. But with a stationless system I was not sure that the WD Labjack routines would have worked.

I hope this description will be of some interest. I find it surprising that there is no on this large forum who could address your question more directly.
Regards,
John

Hi John,

Thanks for your response, and it is good to know that your U3 and EI1050 have provided reliable performance for you. Thanks for the link to your webpage - a very nice page indeed!

Yes, it is a bit surprising there doesn’t appear to be more current experience with the Labjack solutions. They are still current and appear to be well supported by the manufacturer. Most posts to this forum regarding Labjack are several years old now. It is sort of an expensive “experiment” if I purchase the needed items and can’t get it working successfully.

Thanks again,
–Ron