There must be something archaic or stubborn about the personal weather station demographic. Or maybe just a tang of obsolete university workstations, that disinterest in a tolerable user interface that is the hallmark of COBOL programmers or agricultural researchers.

Case in point: The majority of personal weather station hardware still uses a serial connection. Bonus points for anyone who can remember the last computer they had (especially a laptop) with a serial port?

So for years, despite captivating images of real-time weather data from our capacious and award-winning vineyard, where we’d be growing Rhone varietals and raising quail and hydroponic tomatoes off-grid in an ultra-modern pre-fab house in the desert—well, we just couldn’t face the whole serial port problem.

So, David quivered with thrill a month or so ago, when he happened upon a returned Oregon Scientific base station on eBay: Not only was the seller local, but it was one of the few models that had met the challenge of the 21st century. It was USB!

“Weather station! Weather station! Weather!” I heard David shout from his office down the hall. His excited cries devolved into nonverbal coos of glee.

“Why was it returned? What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Who cares? Weather!”

Indeed, who could possibly question the seller? The Hillsboro odds ‘n ends shop, Surplusgizmos.com, not only had the weather station of David’s dreams, but was simultaneously selling a Very Big Machine:

Sadly, the plug and play promise of USB was somewhat of a ruse. David spent, oh, about forty-five hours (I exaggerate) trying to get it to work consistently on Linux. Problem is: Oregon Scientific’s data format is proprietary. Poorly played, guys. We were looking for something egregiously basic: Take data from device, put in file. XML would have been a superbonus.

But no: The few applications that exist for Linux do a lot of what we don’t need and very none of what we do. The one that even began to drift in the general direction of useful came with a pricetag of $70 and a very disconcerting tendency to segfault. When this turned into a permanent It Doesn’t Bloody Work, we knew we’d have to look elsewhere.

Long story short we just bought a new Mac Mini. For $20 we bought WeatherSnoop, which feels a bit rickety but seems to get the job done. It still doesn’t output valid XML (it sort of has an XML via TCP/IP option, but it’s also sort of broken), but it does at least store data in Sqlite and upload it to Weather Underground.

The fact that I have to use Weather Underground’s XML API to access my own data and then give credit to them for data that is our own gives me a bit of a rash, but it works all right: You can see current conditions here at Pencilhaven on my Projects page (near the bottom).

For our next trick…

We’ll be adding more sensors to our weather network here such that we can monitor the wine cellar. Until then, you can find us at the Buckman Weather Station on Weather Underground!