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A personal weather station is simply a collection of weather instruments. Generally
they consist of instruments to measure such things as wind speed, barometric pressure,
humidity, and rainfall. As I was doing my research to see which one to purchase, I found
that there is a wide range of stations to choose from. They ranged from inexpensive to the
price range that would probably mean divorce for me.
The Weather Station that I chose is a wireless Vantage Pro2 from Davis ().
Here is the list of features that I had to have:
- Not to have cables to run from the house to the station.
- A High degree of accuracy, without breaking the bank.
- At minimum, instruments to measure wind, precipitation, and barometric pressure. Additional
sensors would be nice, but are not a requirement.
- Upload the data to this website.
The Vantage Pro 2 from Davis met all of these requirements. At Frye's Electronics,
the weather station came in at just over $500. I did have to buy an additional package
that included a data logger and software to collect the weather data and upload it to this site. I purchased this station in March of 2008, and up to this point, I have yet to have
any hardware problems. This is a solid station, at an affordable price.
To keep the number of physical machines running at a reasonable number, I have
virtualized my server environment. What is virtualization? Virtualization is simply a way to run multiple
operating systems on a single physical server. This keeps down the number of physical computers that
you need to run, thus cutting energy costs. I am using what's called a Bare Metal Hypervisor
from VMware, VMware ESXi (this is a free download). I don't want to dive in to this subject too deep here, so if you would like to know
more about ESXi, visit .
The Weather Link software is running on Windows Server 2008. If you are thinking
of running a setup similar to this, pay attention to this next part. With ESXi, the virtual machines
do not have direct hardware access. This means that you would not be able to use any add-on cards
that are in the physical PC or be able to use any USB device that you happen to plug-in. Yep,
you guessed it. In this setup, a virtual machine will not have access to the Weather Station's data
logger that connects via USB.
This is not the end of the story. I did a little research and found a cool
little device by Belkin that solves this problem, the Belkin Network USB. This
is a device that runs a little over $76 (I found the lowest price at Amazon). Simply put,
it allows you to plug in up to 5 USB devices and share them over the network. A utility
that you install on the computer lists the devices that are available so that you can
select one to connect to. After connected, the device operates just as it would if it was connected
to the computer via a USB cable. It mentions that it doesn't support video devices, but it works
very well with the data logger. Keep in mind, just as with any USB device, only one
computer can be connected at a time. This is well suited for a virtual environment.
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