November 23, 2014

Weather

This is a picture of the internet part of our weather station.

After reading that it was possible to receive the signals sent by the wireless sensor for an Oregon Scientific weather station, I thought it was worth building a project to try this.

This picture is the result.

On the top you can see a 433MHz receiver "shield" that sits on top of an EtherTen Arduino clone. The actual receiver is the small green board on the right.

The software listens to transmissions from the weather station's outdoor sensor (for temperature and humidity) and periodically sends this data to Weather Underground.

Of course the normal Oregon Scientific indoor display continues to work.

The software ended up being the tricky part of this project. There is code available to both decode the transmissions, and upload them to WU. The tricky part was that I wanted to make a nice OO library out of the RF decoding code that you could easily use in other Arduino projects. The library is still a work-in-progress, but it is working well enough that we have been reliably sending data for the past week. I will write about the library again when it is ready to release.

For the current weather in Ashfield see my PWS page.

November 06, 2014

Fix for OpenELEC network issues


I love my OpenELEC media centre running on my Raspberry Pi, but lately I have been seeing a problem where the network does not connect when the device reboots. OpeneELEC is set to use DHCP, but the network interface just doesn't come up.

This is a bit of a problem, as the RPi does not have an internal clock, so it relies on the network to find out the time. Without the correct time none of the scheduled recordings start.

I thought it might have been some update gone bad. I have been manually starting the network every time the box reboots (fortunately not very often) for a while now, until I stumbled upon this bug report:

https://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv/issues/3457

The solution? Remove the files for the network connection manager, and reboot!

rm -rf /storage/.cache/connman/ && sync && reboot