Mangrove Mike's Blog

Over the last few months I have had problems with the Vantage Vue batteries that were failing at about dawn. The Vantage Vue uses solar during the day and batteries overnight which are supposed to last about 18 months.

I'd already replaced the battery in January but it started to fail during May. I don't know if it was a dodgy battery of

I was about to un-plug the old Linux work-horse (being slowly replaced by sexy Mac Mini Server) and realised that I hadn't converted my Currentcost Envi to work on OSX.

I initially thought it would be pretty straight-forward but after a labourious and unusual CPAN update to my perl installation I hit a road block with talking to the Prolific

The Background

When I first started storing data for this website, the software I used was wview (http://wviewweather.com) a pretty good and flexible solution for collecting the data from my Davis Station Vantage Vue.

I've recently moved a lot of my

The objective was to move my xtide code (http://www.flaterco.com/xtide/xtide.html) which was running on an old Fedora Linux box and get it running on my Mac Mini Server running OSX Server 10.6.5 .

I contemplated using the Mac port put together by Lee-Ann Rucker (http://homepage.mac.com/lrucker/XTide/) put it didn't include

It's not just the tides for Merewether but its the tides for Newcastle (which, lets face it, is pretty close). So you could use it for Stockton, Nobbys, Newcastle Beach, Bar Beach / Cooks Hill, Dixon Park Beach, etc.

The Merewether Tides are generated using data massaged from the brilliant program XTide 

I have updated the software that I use to update the website from my Davis Station Vantage Vue.

I am part of the way through the change from my old Linux box to a nice, small, power efficient Mac Mini Server.

The first problem was getting the Mac to talk to the Davis Station data logger. Instead of getting the Davis Weatherlink

The next step was to get the full message and then push up to a little ColdFusion XML consumer to put it all in a database structure.

Step 1:

Starting from the previous bash script I had to then grab the full message to POST up the ColdFusion website to process the data.

The bash script

The code below is the first attempt at getting my original CurrentCost Classic (or WattsClever) energy monitor connected to my only Fedora Core 5 box and updating the data to Pachube.

The Classic connected without any problems (although occasionaly would swap USB ports with my Davis Station connection(???).  

Use