Suggestions needed for ascom observing conditions and weather stations

2 replies371 views
Christian Großmann avatar
Hello community,

for quite a while now, I am interested in integrating my local weather conditions into Nina. I own an Astromy.ch MBox and a Hitec weather station deluxe. The MBox is connected to the ascom observing conditions driver. In theory, the Hitec Astro weather deluxe has ascom drivers (safety monitor), too. But they are 32Bit only and I am not able to connect to the device with my 64Bit Nina software, which I have to use for several reasons. So I am using the Hitecs stand alone software, that is delivered with the weather station. So far, there are worse things, because the alerts are fine and although I could not use it in Nina, it works for the ideas I bought it for. But I could not use the data to automate some things in the advanced sequencer. I did not realize this fact when I ordered it and the support from Hitec told me, that there sadly will be no 64Bit driver available.

I now looked for some usable USB or (W)LAN weather stations, that are not that expensive. I am interested in also monitoring wind speed and direction, which my current devices are not able to measure. I currently read this data from OpenWeatherMap into the ascom observing conditions driver, but that's not real and therefore quite useless. Although ascom did not directly support the standard weather devices (other than described on their web site), there may be some possibilities to use the data i.e. by creating a Boltwood file.

So my question is, what weather devices you are using and if you were able to integrate them into ascom/Nina. I could buy an expensive station like the vantage Pro 2, but paying another thousand euros for another weather station is simply not possible at the moment. I am sure, it is worth the price, but in astro photography, there are always some other things you really need for taking better images smile. But who am I telling this…

So I am thankful for every idea or comment on this topic.
BTW, the main goal is to later build a permanent observatory and reuse the stuff for that.

Thanks in advance

Clear skies

Christian
Alex Ranous avatar
There exists an observing conditions ascom driver that pulls the data from a personal weather station hosted on wunderground.com. So assuming you have internet access from your observatory, you could buy any weather station that can export to wunderground (many of them do), and then configure the driver to pull the data from your weather station page on wunderground.

I have a Davis Vantage Pro2 and I like the hardware - it's pretty bullet proof.  The problem is getting the data out of it.  You need to purchase an extra data logger adapter that plugs into the base station, and you can either hook that to a PC and run Davis's stone age software, or go with a third party software to pull the data out.  I opted to use the meteobridge software, which you can install on a cheap travel wifi router and it can feed the data into wunderground or any number of weather sites, or push it onto some other machine of yours via ftp, or via a database like mysql. 

The meteobridge also has an REST web API to pull the data out.  I wanted my data to be more real time that pulling it via wunderground, so I wrote my own ASCOM driver to pull that data from the meteobridge.

If I had to do it all again, I'd probably get a cheaper, more modern weather station that has WiFi and wunderground support built in without needing to jury rig a bunch of stuff to get the data out.  The Davis station hardware is nice, but they really need to come out with a new modern base station.

Alex
Helpful Engaging
Christian Großmann avatar
Alex Ranous:
There exists an observing conditions ascom driver that pulls the data from a personal weather station hosted on wunderground.com. So assuming you have internet access from your observatory, you could buy any weather station that can export to wunderground (many of them do), and then configure the driver to pull the data from your weather station page on wunderground.

I have a Davis Vantage Pro2 and I like the hardware - it's pretty bullet proof.  The problem is getting the data out of it.  You need to purchase an extra data logger adapter that plugs into the base station, and you can either hook that to a PC and run Davis's stone age software, or go with a third party software to pull the data out.  I opted to use the meteobridge software, which you can install on a cheap travel wifi router and it can feed the data into wunderground or any number of weather sites, or push it onto some other machine of yours via ftp, or via a database like mysql. 

The meteobridge also has an REST web API to pull the data out.  I wanted my data to be more real time that pulling it via wunderground, so I wrote my own ASCOM driver to pull that data from the meteobridge.

If I had to do it all again, I'd probably get a cheaper, more modern weather station that has WiFi and wunderground support built in without needing to jury rig a bunch of stuff to get the data out.  The Davis station hardware is nice, but they really need to come out with a new modern base station.

Alex

Hi Alex,

that is exactly what I was looking for. The wunderground method looks very promising for my needs. Thanks for the hint...

CS

Christian
Well Written