Topic: Any idea how to convince Oregon to make WMR300 interface protocol available?

[docbee]

As a developer of Meteohub/Meteplug/Meteobridge I have to deal a lot with connecting new weather stations to my software in order to give users maximum flexibility to select a station that looks best fitting to them.

While I found support from Hideki, FineOffset and Davis (putting the Envoy8x aside for a moment) as they seem to be interested to give their users the choice of as many SW options as possible, Oregon Scientific stands for a long history of not providing any interface documentation at all. The "secrets" of the wmr100/200 have been lifted over time, but with their new baby the wmr300 this tragedy starts again.

I tried to reach out to Oregon and IDT (their technology partner in China) but as usual didn't even got any answer. As a result I have to tell each potential user of our SW products to stay away from the WMR300 as it is an unusable system, if you plan to do more with it than using the software they handout with the station.

Of course I could buy a WMR300 (which isn't cheap), power-on my USB protocol sniffer and spend my time on decoding the data. But to be honest, I can spend my time more useful and profitable. So it starts to become my interest to keep WMR300 market share as low as possible, because every WMR300 user is not able to use our SW products. Same here in Germany with the very popular WSWIN, where the author also clearly says, that he is no longer supporting stations where no interface specification available.

Why do I put this ranting here? Well, I still believe that this is completely going into the wrong direction, for Oregon and also for the developers of weather station SW. Instead organizing a win-win, Oregon's policy does force us into a conflicting lose-lose situation, with customers
a) staying away from their products (as told by us)
b) being disappointed with the WMR300 because they cannot make use of it as with the ones from Davis, etc.

Does anybody here in the forum has an idea or contact to Oregon that might solve this crazy situation? I am not just writing for our own developments, I think weex, wview, etc should also support this station. So it is up to the user to select the station and the SW he likes most and has a chance to have it working together.

[belfryboy]

I spotted this

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/weewx-development/5R1ahy2NFsk

any help?

[docbee]

Not really, I am not intending being part of a guesswork initiative again. I have done enough on that on the WMR100/200 and it is an extremely boring exercise where you never get a full understanding of the data. The parts not being obvious to decode will keep you busy with unexpected false readings etc. Not fun at all.

We need the full protocol from the manufacturer - no guessing around!

[Old Tele man]

DocBee, your experience with OSI / IDT mirrors what I went through with their WMR200A. I sent e-mails (yes, plural, as in more than one (actually 3)) to IDT in china, but never got a reply...and, that was "straw" that prompted me to move up to Davis™.

[aweatherguy]

I remember reading a thread either on this forum or on Weather-Watch about one of the developers (WD? VWS? Cumulus? don't remember which) finally getting in touch with OS on one of their consoles. I think he finally got through but had to sign a legal non-disclosure agreement before they would share.

OS is behaving like a typical large corporation, and finding out who to contact is the key...unless you contact someone in a department that cares you will be ignored. That is, if you even want to bother trying. You could try looking for that thread here or on W-W perhaps but I don't even remember which forum it was at this point. Or you could try contacting the authors of those other programs to see if they would share info about how they got through to OS.

[JohnDoe1983]

HI.

I also ask them to give Weathersnoop programmer access to their code so I could use their new version of the software and buy a new Oregon station. They said NO.

So, I just bought a Davis Vantage Vue. The h... with Oregon.

When you do not listen to buyer then you loose $$$, incredible to think and act that way.

[docbee]

In the meantime I have a WMR-300 here, so when I get bored with my other tasks, I might give it a try