This weather station has no included sotware for Linux. At pages pendec.dk I found a wwsr utility able to read back some data from weatherstation. This program had however several problems, which I am trying to fix. According to this page this should work for
this I can not guaratee. I tested my modification only at
As pendec.dk forum is not sending registrations, I have to public my modification here.
In pendec.dk forum I found a wwsr2 - modified version of this utility that works also at USB 1.0 devices. It can be compiled also for other than i386 platforms. This wwsr2 utility is not able to interpret the rain data correctly and is also incorrectly handling the temperature data - actually when temperature is bellow zero. In addition to original wwsr utility it is not only able to display values that are stored in station every interval, but also actual values.
For the better interpretation of rain data I would like to thank to kubajz. By a simple experiment he found that rain is a counter of flip flops of rain sensor. One flip according to station display is 0.3mm of rain. The rain is only holding the counter from the beginning of the station run. Other values are calculated. My total rain value at station display is not absolutely the same as what I calculate with this approach. it has some offset, to the calculated value. This is not yet clear to me why. 1h rain value I calculated from previous value (the one stored in station memory) and actual value. This is not the best method but seems to produce at least some data showing 1h rain.
Fo readout of temperature there was used only simple unsigned char. This is not correct as It can not read out data of temperature below zero. When tempareture drops below zero, I got values above 32768, however this is not a binary complement. It seems it is just last bit is a sign. It seems the station can have + and - 0. This is also what I implemented.
As original utility has very unsystematical output, I added option -y that prints out the output in a way that it can be easily parsed. Sure, this utility can directly print and store the data in database, but this is a common practice to have separate part that needs to be run as root to access the USB device and part that is handling the statistic and web pages. At the moment I also have a perl script, that is reading the weather data and storing them in rrd round robin database. It also creates basic html pages with images representing those values. I saw there are several other more advanced programs to capture and display meteo data, however I did not found any that is GNU GPL - free to use.
Software for USB communication with station wwsr.c.
On my Linux system I have to compile this source with:
gcc /usr/lib/libusb.so wwsr.c -o wwsr
libusb.so is for me in package libusb-devel.
As more people seems to be interested, I created a project page at meteolinger.lowlevel.cz.
It's already several month I wrote to Topcom asking them for a documentation of the communication protocol for Topcom 265 NE. Here is my email thru support form:
Message sent on Fri 12th Sep, 2008 05:08 - EST
* Name: Adam Pribyl
* Company:
* Email: x@lowlevel.cz
* Telephone: +42066666666
* Country: Czech Republic
* Language: English
* Message:
I bought your National Geographic Weather station 265 NE. The
provided software is not compatible with my Linux operating system. I
was looking for a software or driver at your pages, but there is none
for Linux just for Microsoft Windows which I am not going to buy. Please
could you provide a software with at least limited capability, to read
out the data from this Weather station for Linux family of OSs? If not,
could you publish or provide us at least the comunication protocol that
is used to comunicate with the device, so we can write the software on
our own? Thanks in advace.
* Serial Nr: 7864990848688 ()
* Producttree:
* National geographic
*
*
*
* Product name: TOPCOM 265 NE
* Problem: Drivers
And here is the answer from Topcom:
Mannuz () (URL) - 21.01 .09 - 09:15
Great! I’m using it on Voyage linux 0.6 on Alix (AMD Geode) HW and it works like charm.Libor (URL) - 11.06 .09 - 16:54
Thanks for making this available to us *nix users!One question: how can I change wind speed units from the
default m/s to knots? I’ve modified the perl code slightly:
$scale = “knots”;
$value *= 1.943846; # convert to knots
just before pushing to the wind hash, seems to work but might have unwanted repercussions ;’)
A small configuration (preferences)file would be a nice addition. Or querying the serial output for the user’s custom units and scaling appropriately.
Thanks again for a fine piece of software!
j. davis () (URL) - 28.09 .09 - 16:13
I think this modification is OK. I am not sure how to detect user preferred units from station data.covex - 09.10 .09 - 15:49
Works on my WH-1080 model also! Great job. However I do not see so much activity here. Maybe you should try to open up this project to the community a little bit more, with a forum for example? And please translate this form to english…Anyway, thanks for this software.
Bengt (URL) - 27.12 .09 - 19:14
The reason is there is quite a lot of other projects, also there was another branch of wwsr rewrited in more proffessional way. However I use this for more than a year and I am pretty happy with it. The main problem with any change is backward compatibility, what is something some people do not want to respect.covex - 09.01 .10 - 11:28