Weather
The weather station uses a solar-powered Davis VantagePro2 integrated sensor suite mounted on the roof of the house. I did not get the optional fan-aspirated radiation shield, so on sunny, windless days, it reads a little high. But, most of the time around here, lack of wind is not a problem!
In addition, there is an extra Davis temperature station, which samples the water temperature at the bottom of our pond — useful to check for stressful conditions for the rainbow trout in the pond.
Both sensors transmit their data wirelessly to a Davis WeatherEnvoy receiver, which is plugged into a USB port of an old Dell Optiplex server, which I bought for $100 on eBay. The server runs SuSE Linux 10.3. The data are collected using the software wview, and then submitted to the WeatherUnderground as station KORHOODR3, as well as being used to update a special weather page, using ftp pushes from the server every five minutes.
