Weather Station Hardware > Davis Instruments Weather Stations

Access Weatherlink archive data from their server?

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guthrie:
Our local lake has a Davis Weatherlink installed, and it provides an online web page that they host at http://www.weatherlink.com/user/rathbunlake/ - with the standard blue background and a few numbers of current conditions.

I have two questions:
1) Do they also host online the more complete history graphs as they show for the WeatherLink for Vantage Pro/ Pro2 ?

2) They say that they maintain more complete archives at the server site than the actual unit does, and those are available through their (proprietary, $$) software. Can one also access it directly, i.e. is the protocol known?

I want to setup a page on my Linux system which would query the station or the archives, and maintian a local history and some fancier graphs.

d_l:
1) No.  Weatherlink.com stores only the raw archival data, the currents data screen, and the daily summary for that weather station which can be download using WeatherLink to a computer IF you have the password for that station account.  Then WL can plot the graphs from that data.

2) An extra copy of the WeatherLink software by itself is all of $21 from Ambient.  You still need to know the account password to be able to download those archives.

guthrie:
Thanks!

If I purchase another copy of Weatherlink, then can I download the data directly, or does it stay captive in their tool?

As I noted:
--- Quote ---"Can one also access it directly, i.e. is the protocol known?
I want to setup a page on my Linux system which would query the station or the archives, and maintain a local history and some fancier graphs."
--- End quote ---

I want to write a Python program to rrd the data into my own web page.

d_l:
It's possible to download it with the Weatherlink software (if you have the password of the stations account) and then you can export the data from the WL database format to a txt file with WL.

Now if you were asking if a program written by you could download directly from the weatherlink.com servers, I don't know if all the protocols have been published to do that.  Davis has published tech notes on downloading from their data loggers so third parties could write download programs, but I don't know if that info is sufficient to cover all aspects of a download from the weatherlink.com server archives.

Davis also has available documentation on their database format someplace (I don't know where).  One of the members here (jruys) has written an application to import a weather data txt file back into the Davis database format.

johnd:
The archive database format is documented in the readme file installed during a standard (Windows) installation of the Weatherlink software. The database is in a packed binary format and, as long as you're comfortable working with this as a programmer, is easy to access.

Other output formats from the WL data logger are documented in the 'Vantage Pro and Pro2 Serial Communications Reference', downloadable from:

www.davisnet.com/support/weather/software_dllsdk.asp

AFAIK the API for retrieving the archive files from the WL servers has not been published yet. Davis are generally pretty good about publishing formats, API's etc, although it can sometimes take quite a while for any update to existing documentation to actually appear. But the API for the server downloads might be a special case because server security could obviously be a concern.

The Windows WL DLL does now apparently support the archive downloads from the WL server and so this facility is now available to 3rd party programmers in general, but only if you're using a Windows environment - won't be much use on a Python/Linux environment I'm afraid.

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