weather

Hacking the Weather Station – Part 3

Hacking the Weather Station – Part 3

In HACKING THE WEATHER STATION – PART 2 I mentioned I needed to capture the reading and writing to the weather station over USB and that I’d started to play with EasyHook. I described roughly how EasyHook works but in this part of the series I’ll explain how I hooked the I/O operations in WeatherSmart in a little more detail. The first step was to define an object that can be used in remote procedure calls (RPC) between my application and the WeatherSmart application. This should be descended from MarshalByRefObject which is pretty standard practice for remoting. I defined methods…

Hacking the Weather Station – Part 2

Hacking the Weather Station – Part 2

In HACKING THE WEATHER STATION – PART 1 I indicated I wanted to attempt to communicate with the weather station over USB directly, bypassing the need to use the official software and the Tycon Windows library. To do this though I first wanted to understand just what the WeatherSmart software sends and receives itself. My first port of call was to look around for some kind of USB sniffing software. I came across and installed USBlyzer which looks something like this: However I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work properly. I could capture outgoing data easily but…

Hacking the Weather Station – Part 1

Hacking the Weather Station – Part 1

In my previous post MY FIRST WEATHER STATION I mentioned how support for my WH2310 weather station outside of the official software is somewhat lacking and that I’d look further into it and so this past weekend I spent some time hacking the device and figuring out how it ticks. The first problem I had to deal with is, where do I begin? I started by looking at the library and documentation that Tycon kindly supplied me which they in turn had gotten off of their supplier. The library comes as a set of files for linking against using a standard…

My first Weather Station

My first Weather Station

So in my previous post I mentioned my recent purchase of an Excelvan home weather station which I spent the weekend setting up. It was actually fairly straightforward to install and get going I was pleasantly suprised. One of the few problems I had with the installation though, more a cosmetic issue, was that the connection cables are somewhat long when connecting to the sensors on the arms, there’s a lot of excess wire and no neat way of reducing it. I settled on winding it around the arm poles for the time being. The hardware can function without a…

What’s the weather like?

What’s the weather like?

The other day a friend was discussing a system he has that records the temperature. This set me off thinking about recording the temperature myself. What would I need? I’d done some amateur electronics in my university days using something akin to the Netduino (an Arduino derivative that runs a micro form of .NET) so started looking at what those offer. Of course I found I could get all the parts, but for what I had in mind I’d need at least two devices, a remote sensing device and some kind of base station. I’d also need some way to…