I’ve been running the Sandaysoft Culumus software since October last year and have nothing but praise for the software, it allows you to do everything from downloading data from weather station base units, to Tweeting the information. One thing I’ve always thought was the themes for web pages weren’t up to much so the I spent some time this month developing my own but in a way it could be useful to others.

The idea was to use a local city/town scape background then display all the different areas of data within boxes, its also easily customisable if you want to add more menu tabs and extra content you can see a live copy of the theme at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/

The theme and all its files including PSD files are hosted on Github http://github.com/magicbug/Culumus-Weather-Theme/ your free to download, use, tinker.

With the QFH its decoding from well above the top of Iceland all the way down to Algeria, and best of all the images are mostly noise free. the antenna is only about 10 feet off the ground attached to the rose arch in the garden.

You can have a look at the images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/ their uploaded a couple of minutes after each pass automatically by the software.

What TweetWX does is searches twitter for the weather terms “Wind, Barometer, Temperature, Rain, Humidity” then shows the tweets in a timeline  this refreshes every 40 seconds with any new weather tweets available.

Each time it reads a tweet it also checks to see if we’ve stored it in our database if not it collects its profile data and stores it so its available as a list on the site for users to find all the current stations available!

The whole site took 1 day to code using the PHP framework CodeIgniter, You can check it out by visiting http://www.magicbug.co.uk/tweetwx

Afterwards it has the ability to upload the decoded image and provides an RSS feed which can be subscribed to, which is handy as you can view the image on any type of device as long as you have Internet access.

After a week and a half of decoding the results have been relativity good considering its not using a crossed or QFH style antenna, images do have noticeable noise on them but there still usable. and the software has performed without any issues.

You can find the latest images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/

You can follow by going to http://twitter.com/oxfordwx which updates on an hourly basis. Tim (G4VXE) has also added his weather station at Longworth you can find it at http://twitter.com/LongworthWx

• 23 x 14.5 x 3.5cm LCD touch screen extra-bright illuminated and monitor
• Wind speed sensor
• Wind direction sensor
• Rain gauge
• Outside temperature / humidity sensor with transmit module
• Cable harness to connect sensors to transmitter
• Mounting arms for sensors and hardware
• Short stub mounting mast
• USB Cable

On arriving home the sensors we’re connected up and Terry G0LUQ and myself placed them on top of our biggest mast in the garden at around 26ft, as they are all wireless it was just a matter of switching on the LCD touch screen and letting it start communicating with the sensors 30ft away.

The sensors seem to provide correct reasonably correct data and how with it logging all the time we’re starting to see trends in the data collected.

Once this was done and data was being displayed, it was time to give the software easyweather a go which was supplied on CD, on first install it was fine but after leaving it a while it was clear that it had bugs and an obvious one was memory leaks.

One downside of the supplied software as also the fact it didn’t allow you to do anything with the data apart from providing a .dat file which was similar in looks to a CSV file with all the data included. What i really wanted to do was get all this data online so I can monitor it anywhere i feel like after searching around on Google I came across a program called Cumulus by Sandysoft.

Which works just like easyweather just with less bugs and what I’d say was a nicer user interface, what was most important though was the fact it included the option to upload the data from the weather station to a website using FTP.

Our page can be found at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com this is updated very 5 minutes normally apart from when its a contest weekend and the software might not be running.