Topic: Feed data to weatherlink Pro with Davis Sensors

[bernard34]

Hello all !
Our setup is currently this:
A temperature sensor probe 6475 connected to the Wireless Sensor Transmitter 6331EU and sending info via WeatherLink Live 6110.
We also log data using a DAVIS 6357 Vantage Vue Sensor Suite with WeatherLink Live Console. Actually, we can log the data from both devices and they are sync.

We would like to measure a temperature of a race track tarmac. The current thermistor sensor 6475 is not suitable to our measure.
Do you know if it is possible to feed data to the weatherlink portal directly ? We would use an IR temp sensor and log its voltage from 0-5v and feed the signal syncronised to the other data on the weatherlink.
If it is not possible, I plan to use a digital potentiometer with an Arduino to command a resistor that would simulate the thermistor probe and therefore could log directly this data.

If it is not clear, just let me know ! Thanks

[johnd]

TBH I think that a local Arduino solution would definitely be simplest.

There is no official or approved way to connect non-Davis sensors to a VP2 station (unless they directly emulate the same output as the Davis sensor, like a RainWise rain gauge for example). The Davis Enviromonitor stations definitely offer much more sensor flexibility but even so: (1) I can't imagine that it would be cost-effective to set up an EM station alongside your existing VP2 station; and (2) I don't recall seeing any IR temperature sensor in the EM sensor catalogue, so even if though it should be theoretically possible to use an EM system there might be major challenges in getting it operating.

All that said, you probably could make a hack of attaching a 0-3v sensor to some other VP2 sensor input like solar for example, but you would need to scale the voltage output so that it made sense eg 50°C track temperature might map to 500W/sqm solar reading.

[bernard34]

Thanks johnd for the reply,

Sounds like we were going the right way... I will see which solution is better between the arduino or using another sensor as a hack.

Still a question open concerning feeding data directly to the Weatherlink.com portal, has someone already done this ?

[johnd]

Still a question open concerning feeding data directly to the Weatherlink.com portal, has someone already done this ?

There is no official way to upload data from non-Davis sensors attached to VP2 stations to weatherlink.com. (As above, Davis EM stations are a different matter.) There are only 2 approaches AFAIK:

1. Emulate a Davis sensor as per my example above using a solar sensor input. In this case, weatherlink.com will have no clue that that data is coming from a third-party sensor. because the IR data will be included in a normal upload packet to weatherlink.com

2. Hack the upload protocol. But the protocol is not public knowledge and I have seen very little forum chat about this option for example. So it's going to involve a lot of investigation, network sniffing etc and code development. Probably not a very cost-effective option to pursue for a small one-off project when there are alternative approaches available.