Author Topic: Introduction to Meteohub (read 1st)  (Read 14059 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline docbee

  • Moderator
  • Forecaster
  • *****
  • Posts: 853
    • smartbedded
Introduction to Meteohub (read 1st)
« on: August 05, 2013, 06:11:08 AM »
As Meteohub is NOT a weather station software to be installed on your PC, I would like to give a short introduction what it is in order to keep the level of general confusion at a minimum.  :-)

Basic Concept:  Meteohub is a complete software stack (including Linux OS, drivers, etc) which is meant to be installed onto dedicated low power, miniature computing hardware. When applying Meteohub SW the HW turns into a dedicated weather server, no longer meant for other computing tasks. The advantages of this approach are...
  • initial installation can be usually done by a few simple steps that don't need any preparation of the HW before (installing OS, installing additional packages),
  • basic configuration tasks (like user administration, network settings, etc) don't need to be done on OS level, which would need knowledge how to setup this, but is all done by the Meteohub Web-GUI.
So after installation the Meteohub behaves like a dedicated Network appliance, comparable to a router or webcam you simply connect to your network and then start configuration by its web interface.

Meteohub inventor is convinced that this approach is fitting very well to what many non-IT-professional weather enthusiast are looking for: a trivial to setup and easy to use weather server, that is headless (no clumsy keyboard or monitor) but can be configured by a browser interface and by that can be located anywhere near your weather station and is easy to maintain via LAN/WLAN/Internet.

The appliance like approach does come with disadvantages as well.
  • no choice of OS underneath Meteohub: Meteohub is based on Debian Linux, so you can install add-ons and can do individual development on the platform, but you can hardly change the OS and, therefore, you may be bound to limitations here. On your PC you define the OS and then you install applications. With Meteohub OS and application stack comes pre-selected and you only can add packages to that.
  • limited choice of hardware: As Meteohub aimes at a very low setup burden it has to make assumptions about the hardware. There are a couple of low-power, reasonable priced hardware options to choose from (http://wiki.meteohub.de/Hardware_Overview), but you are mainly stuck to these. In theory a port to other hardware can be done, but it will require deep Linux knowledge and quite some time to spend on it. List of supported hardware did grow over years, and new platforms will be added in the future.

Having explained the basic concept, you are ready to have a look at http://www.meteohub.de where you find information about what Meteohub does provide in terms of supported weather stations and functionality. When your want to flip through functionality the online manual might be a good starting point (http://www.meteohub.de/files/meteohub-v4.7en.pdf).

Meteohub is not free-ware. You can use it for up to 3 months without purchasing a license. After that you need a license code to continue operation. One-time license fee is 59 Euro, to be paid via PayPal. Licenses can be migrated to new hardware, so you don't have to repurchase when you jump to a newer system. Meteohub is in the market since 2007 and has a user base of a few thousand installations around the globe (mainly US and Europe).
« Last Edit: January 08, 2017, 12:16:58 PM by docbee »
founder of smartbedded.com - home of meteohub, meteoplug, meteobridge, meteostick

 

anything