I was in Radio Shack the other day and picked up a 63-256 “Extreme Range Professional Weather Station” for $69 on clearance (ever since the z-wave sale I check all my local Radio Shacks clearance items religiously). I understand this is basically a rebranded Oregon Scientific WMR100. That isn’t completely correct as the Radio Shack model has a slightly different look to its base station, but otherwise I think they are the same.
I had been looking at these as a way to add wireless temperature sensing in different rooms in my house. The weather is just a nice bonus for me!
Right now I have it hooked up to a Windows Machine running Weather Station Data Logger 4.2 (http://wmrx00.sourceforge.net/)
The base kit for these (RS or Oregon Scientific) provides:
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temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and time (from atomic time radio broadcasts) from the base unit
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temperature and humidity from the THGR800 3-channel sensor that is included (to add on more than 3 you want to get the THGR810 that is 10-channel).
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Wind speed and direction
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Rain bucket
It seems that you can add a total of 10 temperature and humidity sensors for a total of 11 temperature measurements. I am pretty sure that the Wind, Rain, and optional UV sensors don’t use up a channel.
The sensors are a bit pricy ($40) but I’m hoping to get some more on sale. The base unit’s temp sensor is not quite as accurate (+/- 1 deg C) but the wireless ones are quite good (+/- 0.1 deg C). My parents have three of an older model and a few years ago I put them all next to each other in various places and got identical temperature readings. Not that scientific but it satisfied me!
Now the question is how to get all this info into Vera? I am going to try to install Wview on a Pogoplug so I don’t have to have a Windows machine on to record data. I am leaning towards setting up a weather underground account and writing a plugin that scrapes that because I figure it will be more generic (e.g., let people use other stations like Davis: http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=6688.0)
Any thoughts?
Have you seen the below thread for the RFXCOM plugin? seems to be a good starting point:
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=4991.0
I’ve been wanting to dive into this myself, just been a little gun shy on the hardware purchasing. I’ll take a look at my local shacks I guess to see if I can see if they also have this on clearance!
I took a look at that a while ago but the high price of the RFXCOM put that on the back burner for me. But I didn’t think about looking at the plugin’s code to see how it handled the OS sensors!
I should note that I’m not 100% sure the 63-256 will work with the 10 channel sensors. I’m certainly hoping it will, but its display only will show three temperature sensors. In the data logger software it shows all 10 in the status panel. I’ll have to order one to find out I suppose.
I have a WMR-100 that I primarily use just for temperature and humidity sensors (about 5 total). I have been pulling data off it using WeatherSnoop for the mac (http://www.weathersnoop.com/). I then use it’s JSON data to serve data to vera (though a crude plugin I wrote a while ago). It works well except when WeatherSnoop stops collecting data (they don’t know why) and it also requires an always running machine, which I don’t like for energy reasons.
I have been considering diving into either RFXCOM or WeatherPlug (http://www.rainmanweather.com/site/RainmanWeather-Store/WeatherPlug) so I don’t need a computer running all the time. I didn’t know wmrx existed, that is really cool.
It looks like WeatherPlug is basically a program called Meteohub on a Sheevaplug.
I’m going to do a little more research and see if Meteohub would be better than Wview and if I can get it running on a $30 pogoplug. I’m trying to keep all my Vera extensions running on one of my Pogoplugs/Dockstars to save electricity. Well, that and just for the challenge. I’m almost as happy with my Pogoplug investments as my Vera.
I think Meteohub requires a license so I need to do more research and what extra functionality it provides that warrants the $59 cost.
[quote=“radarengineer, post:5, topic:169091”]It looks like WeatherPlug is basically a program called Meteohub on a Sheevaplug.
I’m going to do a little more research and see if Meteohub would be better than Wview and if I can get it running on a $30 pogoplug. I’m trying to keep all my Vera extensions running on one of my Pogoplugs/Dockstars to save electricity. Well, that and just for the challenge. I’m almost as happy with my Pogoplug investments as my Vera.
I think Meteohub requires a license so I need to do more research and what extra functionality it provides that warrants the $59 cost.[/quote]
I’m with you on wanting to pull data from these things without a PC. I have never tinkered with a pogoplug but that would be a nice solution.
My real problem is that I have a WMR-100 base station. There are lots of complaints about this thing locking up at some point requiring a reboot of the unit. The Arduino based WxShield looks neat but still requires software running on Windows (something I don’t have).
I got the WeatherSnoop folks to add a “last capture date” in their data feed so I can see if the unit has stopped responding and maybe toggle a z-wave switch on it to reboot it – to be seen if it works. Still requires a mac running all the time though.
Just added support for Oregon THGN122N,THGR122NX,THGR228N,THGR268 sensors in RFXCom gateway.
Hi,
A new version of the firstRFX gateway is available. Oregon THGN122N,THGR122NX,THGR228N,THGR268 devices are received and processed to vera temperature device and humidity device. Both are created automatically upon receiving the first message (in auto create mode).
I finally got around to building wview on one of my pogoplugs. I ordered a few more pogoplugs so now I have an extra one in my office for development (up to 5 if I count my dockstar) which meant I had no more excuses. Pogoplugs are cheap (~$25), low power (~5W), and great for expanding vera’s capabilities. 
I had to build wview and radlib (supporting library from the wview author), but it was fairly straightforward. I’m happy to include more detailed installation instructions if anyone else is interested. Wview is successfully pulling data from my 63-256 (rebranded WMR-100) and generating a somewhat ugly webpage. I’ll have to update my template when I get a chance…
The one thing I don’t have working (yet!) is the wview web admin console. It has been a while since I played with virtual domains and cgi and it is just taking me a little while to get the cherokee web server configured correctly.
Next I just need a wview scraping plugin for Vera!
[quote=“radarengineer, post:9, topic:169091”]…
The one thing I don’t have working (yet!) is the wview web admin console. It has been a while since I played with virtual domains and cgi and it is just taking me a little while to get the cherokee web server configured correctly.
Next I just need a wview scraping plugin for Vera![/quote]
So I fought mightily with getting the wview admin console to play nicely for me. You can dig this out of the various wview fora and mailing lists with some effort, but here’s the scoop: if you use the wviewconfig script to set things up, and you changed the default admin password, things get broken. The web GUI takes the password you enter, computes an MD5 hash of it, and compares that to what is stored in the DB. The wviewconfig just stores the naked password you provide, so a password set from the script will never work for the GUI.
What I had to do (as an alternative to reinstalling from scratch) to get this working was to go into the script and work my way forward to the point near the end where it asks for the admin password. At that point, I pasted in the result of putting my desired password into an MD5 encoder–there are tons of them on the web. After that, it worked.
If your Vera is on the same subnet as the plug running wview, it may be easier to query the sqlite3 DB for last recorded readings than to try to scrape the web page. I have wview set to archive data every 5 minutes, so at worst, data is 9 minutes old when I snag it. I can live with that. My Vera is in a protected subnet, and the wview machine is in the DMZ, so I just wrote a little CGI/PHP script to do the DB queries in response to web requests, and that’s working for me.
–Richard
Richard, thank you for the hint on just accessing the sqlite3 DB and the wviewconfig password. Fortunately for me all the wview machine and vera are on the same subnet!
I haven’t changed the default password yet. It turns out my only issue with the admin console was needed to uncomment a few modules in php.ini. Everything is working well now.