Cumulus Support

I'm interested in building a solar radiation sensor and interfacing it with my La Crosse WS2357 station. I'm not sure if this is even possible but if it is, how would I arrange to merge the signal from the new sensor with all the other data from my base station?

BTW, I have thrown out the serial/USB converter and have my station directly connected to a serial port on my PC.

Any ideas on building the sensor and processing its signal would also be appreciated.

Many thanks.

From the Cumulus point of view: there's no provision for solar data in the La Crosse data protocol, so even if you could somehow interface a solar sensor to your station (which I doubt) there's no way that Cumulus could read the values.

I think your best approach would be a stand-alone sensor not interfaced to your station. It's possible that at some point I will add the ability to read solar values from a file on the PC, a few others have asked for this. You would have to arrange somehow for this file to be created and updated.

Thanks for that reply Steve, although not exactly the news I was hoping for.

I'm going to take your advice and try to build a stand-alone sensor which interfaces independently to my PC and creates a data file. Any advice from anyone who has done something similar would be much appreciated.


Cheers,

Ant

Ant,
Steve's suggestion re- standalone sensors is probably your best bet.

If you can read data from the hardware and store it in a file there's nothing to stop you using js or php to process that data and integrate it in your webpages.

steve wrote:................................. It's possible that at some point I will add the ability to read solar values from a file on the PC, a few others have asked for this. You would have to arrange somehow for this file to be created and updated.

I like the sound of that Steve!