Wx.Ca News

Wx.Ca News

Randy Peters  //  Wx.Ca

 
Jul 28 / 8:38pm

It must be a July thing

It seems like the only time I post here is in July and something in the weather station has failed. Thank goodness July is almost over. This year, I have had to replace the Tini board and, as many of you have pointed out, it has apparently been pretty bright outside many nights lately??? So obviously, the photo sensor has not been well.

Now the reporting has been out solidly for a few days.

I was hoping it was a cable again. The only cabling on the roof that didn't get replaced last July was a short run from the lightning sensor to the photo sensor. I changed that out, but no go. But interestingly, while I had the photo sensor out to replace its cable, the rest of the sensors were all OK. Put in the new cable and other sensors dropped off again.

It looks like I'll be ordering a new photo sensor to replace this one.

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Until it arrives, there will be no Solar Radiation in the charts. But it hasn't been very useful lately anyway, has it?

Thanks to several followers who have sent messages of encouragement. It sure helps.

Comments (1)

 
Jul 19 / 5:21pm

Bad couple of weeks for Wx.Ca

Well, believe it not, today's outage of Wx.Ca was not related to my continuing cable issues. Today's problem was caused by the Tini having a dead on-board battery, so a power glitch wiped out it's brains. This has happened a few times before. I reloaded it and we are up and running again.

The bad cable is still in place, so that could still be an issue until it's replaced. The lightning chart is reporting very strange numbers. It's sensor is on the bad cable. This evening doesn't look like the kind of weather to be walking around on the roof - nearly the highest point in the neighbourhood too.

Thanks for the offers of some cable from a couple of you - including one just a few doors down the street. I've already bought a 500 ft spool. It's rated indoor/outdoor so I'm hoping the UV won't turn the sheath brittle like on my current cable.

Comments (3)

 
Jul 18 / 8:43pm

Keep your fingers crossed

Wx.Ca is working again. I had to run a new Cat 5 cable up to anemometer. The sheath has cracked and it was filling with water. I see the cable running to the solar and lightning sensors needs replacing too, but I'm out of cable. Here's hoping it will hold up until next weekend.

Comments (4)

 
Jul 17 / 9:34pm

Wx.Ca Is Back

Wx.Ca is back up and reporting all sensors.

This morning when I started to fix the problem, my best guess at the problem was the 1-Wire hub that interfaces the 1-Wire port on the data acquisition Tini board to four runs out to the various sensors.

I have a spare, sort of. This morning, it was just a pile of parts.

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So I heated up soldering iron and got to it. Soldering those tiny surface mount components is tricky, but there were only about a dozen of them. Here's the after shot.

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After hooking it up to the sensor runs and the Tini board - no change! Oh no.

Some careful isolating of the various sensors showed that when the run to the anemometer on the roof was disconnected, all the other sensors came back.

So, next step was to head up to the roof to get the anemometer. When I brought it inside and opened the case, this is the shaft I found and what should be two bearings.

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The right upper bearing has failed and the whole enclosure interior were coated with brown oxide, including the connections and circuit board. That shaft should be smooth its whole length, so the dip in the middle has been ground away to iron filings. The oxide was likely shorting out something. I cleaned up the board and installed it in spare enclosure with a spare shaft and everything seems be working again.

Thanks to everyone who expressed their concerns for the site being down.

Comments (1)

 
Jul 14 / 7:59pm

Wx.Ca Unavailable

Sorry, but Wx.Ca is sick. It seems to be a hardware problem with one of the 1-Wire sensors or the 1-Wire hub that connects them to the Tini data acquisition board. No ETA for a fix yet.

Comments (3)

 
Jul 5 / 9:48pm

Love my iPad - Rogers, not so much

I've had a 3G iPad for a little over month now - since launch day in Canada!

The day I got it, I thought I'd try Bell as the 3G provider. Turns out Bell could only do activations over the phone and they were closed for the weekend?!?!

So I got a Rogers SIM instead. Activation was done on the iPad and I was surfing in 5 minutes.

30 days later, things have fallen apart though.

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Rogers billed my credit card for another 30 days - but no 3G connections. In fact they billed the credit card twice - but no connections. Sounds like I'm lucky though. Some people have had their credit card billed 30 times and still no 3G data!  http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=955269 

Lot's of bars, but no network connections.

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This has been going on since June 30, so for 5 days now. It seems the customer reps at Rogers have no way of seeing iPad accounts. I have been forwarded to umpteen different people on 3 different occasions. It usually ends with them telling me to contact Apple. Apple can't believe Rogers has been saying this. They have received quite a few of these calls.

Rogers latest suggestion was to book an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar! I guess that's to keep me off their back for a few days.

Comments (1)

 
Jan 13 / 7:06pm

Wx.Ca Was Missing Due to IP Address Change

Many people noticed that Wx.Ca was unavailable for a couple of days. The problem was that the IP address assigned by Shaw changed. A quick update to EasyDNS and everything is OK again.

Shaw has only changed our IP address twice before in the last 12 years, so I have never bothered to install one of the clients that will notice when the assigned IP address changes and send the update to EasyDNS. Now that it's the Airport Extreme that gets the address assigned to it, I'm not sure it's even possible.

Comments (2)

 
Oct 17 / 9:49am

Wx.Ca readings are missing because the TStik loses its brains.

Wx.Ca is missing readings for the past 12 hours. The culprit has been located:

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The little TStik board from Systronix that samples all the sensors every 3 seconds lost its programming. A simple reload of the Java byte code that it runs and all is well again.

Comments (0)

 
Oct 11 / 10:40pm

Served by Snow Leopard

The other two Macs at Wx.Ca have been running Snow Leopard for about 6 weeks now. No big issues, so today I upgraded the server as well.
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I did hit one minor snag. It may be related to the OS upgrade also upgrading Java 5 to Java 6.

The server listens for a multicast packet from the Tini board sensor monitor. Previously, this was done just by joining a MulticastSocket to the correct IP address and listening. However, under Snow Leopard and Java 6, the socket only appeared to be listening on the loopback interface, lo0 as reported by netstat -g. The cure was to call socket.setLoopbackMode(true) which disables listening on the loopback interface and then listens on the ethernet interface.

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