NollarWind Equipment
Weather Station
The weather station is a Davis Vantage Pro2, which is one of the the top-of-the-line personal weather station. Station data is sampled every 2 ½ seconds, which provides a number of data packets that are recorded every 10 seconds. This data is summarized and uploaded every 5 minutes to this web site, the National Weather Service, NOAA, and several other private weather services.
The Vantage Pro2™ Wireless Weather Stations include four components:
- Integrated Sensor Suite (ISS) which houses and manages the external sensor array
- Console, which provides the user interface and data display
- Weather Envoy, which ia an interface between the ISS and the data logger
- Data logger, which is a serial interface between the Weather Envoy and the computer
The Vantage Pro2 ISS and Weather Envoy communicate via a FCC-certified 902 Mhz - 928 Mhz (license-free), frequency hopping spread spectrum technology transmitter and receiver. The wireless ISS is solar powered with a battery backup.
The sensor array includes:
- Rain collector
- Temperature sensor
- Humidity sensor
- Anemometer (wind direction and speed)
Computer Hardware
The server is a 2U rack mounted Dell Poweredge 2850. Electrical power is supplied via a Powerware 9120-3000 uninterruptible power system. Backup electrical power is provide by a whole-home (12kW) Briggs & Stratton generator with a load-shedding transfer switch.
The Dell 2850 Poweredge includes:
- Duel Intel Xeon Processors @ 3Ghz (1MB L2 cache)
- 6 GB ECC SDRAM
- 6 SCSI Hardrives @ 73GB (15,000 RMP)
- RAID 5
- 700W Redundant Power Supplies
Computer Software
All the software is freely available for download on the Internet as part of the Open Source Initiative under a variety of licensing agreements. I am using "bleeding-edge" software on the weather server. Some of it is in alpha or beta versions.
Software installed on the weather server includes:
- Operating system: FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT with a custom kernel
- Database: my SQL 5.1.3
- Web Server: Apache 2.2.11
- Scripting language: PHP 5.2.8
- Scripting language: Perl 5.8.9
- Weather program: wview 5.17.3
Web Server
The web server is provided by JW NetSource, LLC.