Displaying Weather Statistics

[Bill Legge]

I've nearly completed by weather station and want to show some of the data on my PC.

Has anyone got a Visual Basic (or anything else) program to run on a PC that can accept data via the COM port and show:

1. Wind direction and speed - ideally by some sort of historical radial plot.

2. Graphs of other readings: humidity, temperature, pressure and so on.

Previously I've used the StampPlotPro from SelmaWare but can't get a radial plot out of it.

Regards Bill Legge

[Elnino]

I doubt you will find many apps to do that.

I have used RRDTool for graphing. RRDtool is sort of a database in itself. I made myself an anemometer based on a 16f628A which spits out data and logs to an RRD for display on my web server. Mine runs on linux/php, not Windows but you're welcome to it though.... I can't see reason you could not port the setup to windows - I belive there is an RRDTool for win32 and PHP is definately doable. Where you might get stuck is on the serial coms class i use.

VB is very easy to work with serial ports and VBExpress is free if you have to use windows.

[Bill Legge]

Thanks Elnino,

I will have a loot at RRDTool - I've hot heard of it before.

I have learning VB on my 'to do' list. I get a bit confused with:

1. VB6
2. VB2006
3. Visual Baisic.Net
4. VB Express and so on...

Not sure what to focus on?

Regards Bill Legge

[mackrackit]

To add more confusion look at some of the alternatives to VB.

Dave Houston likes Pure Basic. Being that Dave uses it I will say it must be good.

I find myself using Python and Liberty Basic.

And in the long run will you want cross platform comparability ?

Pure Basic and Python are.

Just thoughts.

[dhouston]

While Purebasic has extensive graphics capabilities (it's a favorite of game programmers) it is not as easy to create this type of graphics as it is with VB. PB requires more low-level work.

The advantage of Purebasic is that it is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, OSX) and compiles to small, efficient, standalone executables.

[falingtrea]

One thing you could do is upload the weather data to a website like weatherunderground.com. Then you can let them display the data. And manage the webcode.