Author Topic: Introduction to Meteobridge (read 2nd)  (Read 12324 times)

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Offline docbee

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Introduction to Meteobridge (read 2nd)
« on: August 05, 2013, 06:41:21 AM »
When you have read "Introduction to Meteohub" (please read http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=19755.0 before you continue here) you might wonder why there is a second offering named "Meteobridge" that also looks like an appliance. Why not just stick with Meteohub?

Problem Statement: Over the years it became obvious that many users of Meteohub are mainly using the system for feeding their weather data to Internet weather networks like Weather Undergound, CWOP, etc. For these users Meteohub is not a perfect fit, as most of the functionality of Meteohub is about local storage of weather data, generating graphs, suporting more than one weather station in parallel, etc. These enthusiast features demand a platform with reasonable computing power and lots of flash storage (4GB) like SheevaPlug, ALIX. As a result, smaller and less expensive platforms with a power demand down to 1-2 watts are out of reach for Meteohub.

Basic Concept: Idea of Meteobridge is, to reduce the Meteohub approach to just take weather data from your station and to transport this to the most popular Internet weather networks at a minimal footprint in terms of hw cost, power demand and installation hassle. Meteobridge does not store weather data locally and does not provide graphing - this is the job of the weather networks where data has been transferred to. Meteobridges are operating in your WLAN, so you just put the tiny box beside your weather station console, give it 1-2 watts power and you are done.

Meteobridge works on miniature routers from TP-LINK and ASUS (http://meteobridge.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware), which are simply flashed with a Meteobridge firmware image. Having done that these are loosing their original router functions but are now pure Meteobridge appliances. Support of weather stations is mostly like Meteohub, but you have less configuration options and cannot drive more than one of them with one Meteobridge (http://meteobridge.com/wiki/index.php/Stations).

During development phase in 1.HY 2013 additional features where added to Meteobridge, which allow to send data to individual servers via HTTP, FTP, mySQL so that feeding your own backend applications can be achieved by the more tech-savvy and demanding users. You find full documentation here: http://meteobridge.com/wiki/index.php/Home

Meteobridge is not free-ware. It can be tested 14 days for free, after that a one-time license fee of 65 Euro has to be purchased via PayPal to continue operation. Meteobridge was born in early 2013 as a result of an interesting discussion with Weather Underground about how to lower the barrier that might keep private weather observers away from participation at Internet weather networks with their own data.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2017, 12:15:13 PM by docbee »
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