Topic: WS-2080 WeatherHub2 homegrown alternative?

[smokeybandit]

Has anyone come up with homegrown alternatives to getting data off the weather station short of buying one of the expensive IP hubs?

Having mine plugged into a laptop 24/7 isn't that big of a deal, but I'd rather put the console somewhere in the kitchen and don't feel like throwing a laptop there.

[DanS]

Perhaps a USB-ethernet-USB extension if you can run a cable between them?  I've never tried this myself.

edit: Welcome to the forum btw!

[smokeybandit]

That may work. 

In an ideal world, I'd love to be able to use a USB to ethernet adapter to plug it into the back of a hub and be able to access the data directly as if it was a storage device.  I'm sure I'd be missing about 5 steps though.

[DanS]

Since the console/display stores up to 4080 data sets couldn't you periodically connect the laptop to download this data and use it this way? Is this what you mean or am I way off base here?

[smokeybandit]

Since the console/display stores up to 4080 data sets couldn't you periodically connect the laptop to download this data and use it this way? Is this what you mean or am I way off base here?

I'd rather not have to connect it to a computer at all.  I want to use it in some configuration that'd essentially emulate the overpriced WeatherHub2.  I figure someone has had the same idea in the past.

[DanS]

This thread has some ideas from members that may help.

[Kidsmakeyoucrazy]

New guy here.  I may have a solution for you.  I just (as in today) took a router that was compatible with tomato-usb firmware and had a USB port and made a poor mans weatherhub.  Parts needed:

1 wireless router with a usb port that is supported by dd-wrt, tomatousb or openwrt firmware
1  usb hub (not needed if the router has 2 usb ports) - unpowered hub will work fine
1 usb flash drive, 1GB is more than enough

Basically flash tomato-usb (or openwrt or dd-wrt, whatever the router you have supports), connect the hub to the router and plug in the flash drive, install optware on the flash drive (instructions here http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Optware,_the_Right_Way ), then grab pywws from here http://code.google.com/p/pywws/ and install it on the flash drive.

Once you have everything configured, you can have the router send updates to weather underground, pws etc and even have it ftp them to another computer in your home.  If you wanted to get really fancy I think it's possible with the scripts in pywws to build a mini webserver on the router as well.

I'm still waiting for weather underground to start showing my station data though.  It does say it's active, but no data yet...but it's only been 2 hours and the station has never been online before.  If it works and anyone's interested I'll put together a more detailed how-to.

BTW, total cost including the router $35 bucks

EDIT:  Just checked and it's reporting to weather underground.  Let me know if there's interest in a detailed how-to.

[smokeybandit]

If anyone cares, I was able to set all this up using an NSLU2 device running SlugOS (pretty well documented, though I had to try different documented ways of doing the same thing) and pywws software (couldn't get wview to read data via USB) and connected to the web via a D-Link pocket router (also documented on NSLU2-linux.org).

Got the NSLU2 and the router via ebay.