LGR - Davis Weather Station for Windows 3.1
Added 2021-10-05 01:02:55 +0000 UTCGot another video here that's been in the works for a good while! This is the Davis Instruments Complete Weather Station from the 1990s, accompanied by the WeatherLink add-on hardware and software for Windows 3.1 PCs with a serial port. Wind! Rain! Graphs! FUN!
Or I think it's fun at any rate, ha. As soon as I learned about this thing through an LGR viewer sending the kit over new old stock, I was captivated by the idea. I've always thought that observing and recording weather data was oddly enjoyable somehow, but being able to do so using real weather instruments and a 486 PC? Yeah that's my idea of a good time right there. Mm, gimme all of those 256 color graphs and low-res NOAA reports.
And yeah, I began this back in June but ended up enjoying the data collection aspect enough that I kept it going until now in October, hehe. In fact it's still going out there right now as I haven't had the heart to take it down, even though I really need to do so since it's not in the best spot and several bits of the hardware need replacing/upgrading for longterm usage. Whatever, even in its current inaccurate state I just think it's fun. Hopefully that translated to a fun video as well. Enjoy!
Comments
Ha! Me too, it seems like a Johnny kinda thing actually
LGR
2021-10-12 12:33:35 +0000 UTCClint, I hope you read this so late (As I was on the BRP, yes THAT BRP, on vacation). I had a LaCrosse WS-3610 which is the competitor to Davis, and it was circa 2001ish. (LaCrosse still has the product page and manual up today shockingly. And even the "Heavy Weather PRO V1.1" for download...) Seriously go to "heavyweather.info" and see information I seen in the same format I did back in the day. It's like it's frozen in time... And I love it. Alas I had a sensor issue and it got warrantied and refunded months later but I LOVED it while I had it. It was hooked up to the family PC running Windows 2000. It. Was. A. Dream. Thank you for letting me relive childhood memories. Thank you Clint. P.S. Asheville is beautiful this time of year!
Christopher Bassett
2021-10-10 23:24:01 +0000 UTCThis is awesome! And not at all unaffordable. Something I can totally see Johnny Hemberger falling into as a new hobby :)
Asaf Sagi
2021-10-09 13:02:00 +0000 UTCI'm the IT person at a public school and we have an Earth Networks kit very similar to this that's been on the roof and in a network closet for 2 decades or so. I just started this year and helped them revive it after it went down when everyone left the building for COVID. The county weather agency even contacted us about its outage because they use it as a reference point for the area! Love stuff like this.
2021-10-07 00:37:20 +0000 UTCFor a late 90s consumer weather station, that sure was impressive. My last weather station didn't have PC or App connectivity and only lasted about 2 years before it got weather beaten! When I recently replaced it, I was surprised how many new ones lack either rain or pressure measurement. I bought my current one (Sainlogic) from Germany, which measures the same, plus light and UV index. The unit itself displays all the readings together, but requires a PC or App to browse the history. This is the web interface (read-only), i.e. here in the north west of Ireland: https://www.ecowitt.net/home/share?authorize=77RH45
Seán Byrne
2021-10-06 20:35:39 +0000 UTCYes! I'd say a 486 and Windows 3.1 goes a long way towards elevating the appeal of any old sensors
LGR
2021-10-06 15:13:16 +0000 UTCI love the aesthetic of that era of software. Always impressive how much can be done with so little CPU power by today's standards. I cobbled together a weather setup as part of my home automation. I discovered that a cheap Software Defined Radio dongles can read AcuRite and similar wireless weather sensors around the neighborhood. I combined influxdb and Grafana to make some graphs, and got hooked, just like you. Now I have a weather station and half a dozen temperature/humidity sensors strewn around the house and yard 😄 Ended up writing a utility to get the 433MHz sensor data (among other things) published to Home Assistant: https://piglab.reaperlegion.net/home-automation/hass/mqtt4hass
2021-10-06 14:13:02 +0000 UTCDamn what a cool piece of kit.
Xerxes
2021-10-06 13:57:38 +0000 UTCI have been using a "one wire" adapter connected to various sensors around the house and inside. The sensors are really cheap and I have it monitoring the inside and outside temps and temperature of the central heating. Since I used to be away from home a lot it was nice to monitor the house temp especially in the winter (I live in finland so it might be -30 outside and heating must be left on permanently all winter). The software turns the temperature into charts which it uploads as web pages to a server every 10 mins.
Richard Bevan
2021-10-06 11:08:25 +0000 UTCOh man, that was a fun one to watch! I'd been looking forward to it ever since it appeared on your opening packages video. It's super neat to see the old simple software interface and I'm glad you collected a few months of data to really demonstrate those graphs. If you ever do decide to hook up a new interface to it so it can also be accessed over WiFi, that would make for a fun blurbs!
Dan Fiscus
2021-10-06 05:55:17 +0000 UTCwow! too bad the sensors weren't the best, but that's totally rad that it worked on a 486 ^_^
Evan B
2021-10-06 03:09:43 +0000 UTCA rainy day today, watching the data roll in on the day's weather right now. Cozy indeed :)
LGR
2021-10-05 23:31:36 +0000 UTCOh that's awesome!
LGR
2021-10-05 23:31:14 +0000 UTCThis is awesome. My grand-uncle has this exact software going on an old 486 in his basement.
CONATH
2021-10-05 20:35:49 +0000 UTCThis was an amazing video :D Watching the weather from my 486 on a rainy day ahh,, it would be so cozy :)
Uncleawesome
2021-10-05 20:35:24 +0000 UTCHappy to join the cult! I honestly didn't know it was a thing until starting work on this thing and now I'm truly excited to dive deeper into the hobby in the future
LGR
2021-10-05 18:24:47 +0000 UTCThat's a fancy bird toilet.
Alyxx the Rat
2021-10-05 17:04:10 +0000 UTCHaven't heard of WeeWX, thanks for the tip on that!
LGR
2021-10-05 16:12:51 +0000 UTCOh, the humidity... really? :-)
Gary Leigh
2021-10-05 12:41:34 +0000 UTCForget being cool in 1997, this is still cool now! Neat!
Mat Cooper
2021-10-05 10:54:41 +0000 UTCOne of us, one of us!!! Hello Clint and welcome to the logging cult of weather. I for one was bitten 2 months ago when at work this old worn out station was taken out by a sudden flood. It never worked and I thought it was stupid. But boss man said install this new one he had from Ambient Weather (not a fancy one). From installing it and watching it graph 📉 I was hooked with the day night temp cycle like yourself. I for one welcome an LGR weather channel of outside weather phenomenons clips and comments on your recent weather happenings. But watch it now, it's a rabbit hole next you'll suddenly be hankering for a fancy mower and next thing you'll notice is that harbor freight is your 2nd home. Then you'll feel that this younger generation seems strange and you have a strong reason to tell them to leave your property. Otherwise this was a great video I plan on rewatching for future background noise during work.
PiraTed
2021-10-05 06:23:50 +0000 UTCAbsolutely loved this. Weather nerding and Windows 3.1. I'm very tempted to see how complex the serial data protocol is to reverse engineer. Heck, someone may have even done that already. Hook up an Arduino, some sensors and link it to a copy of that Weather Station software. If you do grab the new Davis hardware, maybe you could pipe that data into a WeatherStar 4000 simulator to recreate those 90s The Weather Channel vibes (with smooth jazz, of course!).
Adam Christensen
2021-10-05 05:45:24 +0000 UTCThat explains the weird can of shaving cream I found in the mud the next morning
LGR
2021-10-05 05:43:15 +0000 UTCOdd thing is the other, newer outdoor sensor I compared it to is under the same roof attached the same way and reads far more accurately!
LGR
2021-10-05 05:42:44 +0000 UTCYour temperature sensor may have been warmed by the thin roof it was under? I've dabbled with temperature/humidity/pressure data gathering with cheap modern sensors and microcontrollers, and always found I needed to have the sensor kinda dangling from a wire to get accurate temperature readings (otherwise it would get warmed/cooled by the surface it was resting on). Very cool in any case, it seems to simultaneously have vibes of "What to buy for your millionaire husband that has everything" and "Cool educational Christmas gift for your geeky teenager"
RetroSwim
2021-10-05 05:38:06 +0000 UTCWhy am I reminded of the movie Twister? "No, I'll set up the lab and you'll analyze the data!"
Jurassic_Jacob
2021-10-05 04:51:14 +0000 UTCVery cool! I love stuff like this. I've been running a Tempest weather station from Weather Flow at home for about a year now. It's a pretty cool little self-contained station. You can browse public stations on their map here. https://tempestwx.com/map/ Not *terribly* inexpensive but they do regularly have 15% off sales. https://shop.weatherflow.com/collections/frontpage/products/tempest
Tristan
2021-10-05 03:07:00 +0000 UTCI would have been all over this as a kid, I always loved computer screens covered in graphs and sensor read outs. I was a big fan of things like rain meter for that, makes you feel like a important scientist or something
Zachary Outen
2021-10-05 02:09:37 +0000 UTCI've been seriously anticipating this ever since you first received it some months back. Don't know what that says about me, but weather, man. I like it.
Steve Skafte
2021-10-05 01:47:39 +0000 UTCLooks like you changed it from David to Davis before I got here! Been running Vantage Vue Pro 2 for a few years now (but on Linux) with WeeWX! If you want to do it on more modern hardware I recommend WeeWX as it will make fancy modern webpages, and yes you can still get the TXT NOAA reports out of it: https://www.toddncweather.org/archive/NOAA-2020.txt Although I do miss the retro graphics of the old software. But the newer pages do look more friendly: https://www.toddncweather.org
EJ22
2021-10-05 01:41:01 +0000 UTCAm I the only one reminded of Jurassic Park around 19:04? :D
Robert Butler
2021-10-05 01:33:47 +0000 UTCHa!
LGR
2021-10-05 01:13:57 +0000 UTCDavid Weatherstation is my advice column pen name
Andrew Ferguson (DominateEye)
2021-10-05 01:13:20 +0000 UTC
