Standard interface or drivers

[rmorgan001]

I don't know much about weather stations or their software. I'm a programmer and I'm interested in any known standards for drivers that run weather stations suchs as interface definitions or generic drivers that might already exist. Is there anything like this around?

thanks
Rob

[steve]

Each manufacturer has its own proprietary interface; some are helpful and publish the interface (e.g. Davis), some are not and do not (e.g. Fine Offset).

[rmorgan001]

thanks for the reply. I'll hunt for the Davis specs, but do you know the URL for this?

We had the same issue with Astronomy hardware and obveratories so a group was created to standarize interfaces. I'm now part of that group and we've been discussing making a standard for weather stations. Would you be interested in helping define a basic set of interfaces? I could certainly propose the new interface standard to the group and even write the drivers and simulators we use for testing. We're preparing for our version 6 release which includes standards for cameras, telescopes, switches, domes, focusors, rotators, and filterwheels. A weather station would be an excellant addition to this and might even spark a whole new area of interest for manufactures. Again, let me know if your interested.

Thanks
Rob

[steve]

The Davis documentation is here - http://www.davisnet.com/support/weather ... dllsdk.asp

You might want to have a look at Meteohub, which drives multiple types of weather station and (amongst other things) presents the data from all of them as a single interface. I plan to add support for Meteohub to Cumulus at some point.

[mcrossley]

Ha, hi Rob, another ASCOM refugee on the forum then!

Mark

[rmorgan001]

Hi Mark! I was looking at the Davis interfaces definitions and there is alot of good info there. At times there seems to be some excitment for this type of interface in ASCOM so I hunt things down when I need a break from release 6.