SGI: Development

Cheers 2 all. As of recently in the free time im working on a small software project called Irix Weather Station || iws. The name targets its purpose, and the audience will be from hobby / personal / home spectrum. The intention is to use low-end SGI machines like Indy / O2 for interfacing / measuring and collecting data from hobby / personal weather stations. The starting hardware comm. interface will be RS232. I hope there will be more users interested in (besides me ). 4 now i post here the very early pre-alpha build screen-shoot (that in future may change), and hope you will like it ... i will post new updates on the development progress on this thread.

Very cool! Keep us posted!

Wow!, very interesting! ...if the Canavan's port of XAnalyser qualified for me like the project of the year for the past year, I think this thing qualifies as a clear project of the year for 2010! Long life to IRIX/MIPS!

How do you actually obtain the data, sounds VERY interesting.

1-Wire sensors maybe? ...I2C?

Yeap, but I've guessed he would probably be using some kind of of-the-shelf 1-Wire-To-RS232 or I2C-To-RS232 bridge to adequate the signals levels, buffering, etc... but you're right: it can be done just by the T=R*C method altering one or both of the variables, reading the RS232 pins without any kind of extra interface... and using either capacitive, resistive, or pulse-generation sensors.

I'm willing to bet we are talking about one of those 'weather stations' that measures temperature, windspeed, barometer, etc, all in one. From the likes of columbia weather systems or weatherhawk. You can probably get something cheap at radioshack or home depot.

Hopefully Mr. Cow can give us a little more detail about the hardware he is using

LOL

Very nice project.


I was actually looking some time ago, if there was similar software made for RISC OS and found this: http://oww.sourceforge.net/
It may be of interest to someone, as there is Linux port and it might compile on Irix.

If there is not too much time to spend with low-level hardware, I'd use commodity wireless sensors with a LAN interface multi-protocol radio receiver from rfxcom.com . For wired reliability, the project may need more hardware development: choice of sensors, frost protection heating of rain gauge and wind, transient (lightning) suppression and forecast using an electric field mill, then deal with wiring, noise, non-linear sensors, calibration, ADC... unless one can afford off-the-shelf SDI-12 sensors.

I'm sure it wasn't anyone's intent, but let's be careful not appearing critical of a developer or project we've only seen a screen shot of. Heaven forbid we say anything that might discourage someone developing IRIX software.

And most importantly - thanks to cybercow for doing some *new* IRIX-based development, and sharing his work with the forum.

Thank you all for your replys i really appreciate your feedbacks guys. In fact on the start, when the whole idea of this was born i was focused only on certain type of weather station (that i own) that is ws2300 series for home / hobby purpose and that is ideal for experimenting and in general to play with it, because is un-expensive and really affordable. But as the thing grow i took another approach -:> in fact only extended the focusing only on one type of possible station hardware can be used. So currently the project will go in this steps:

1. Finishing the UI that you can see on the preview screenshoot i posted. (this part is currently in development)
2. Making the abstracted interface layer for sensors. (preparing to start with)
3. Making the "nullStation" that will simulate "real" sensors, so anyone can test and run the station software for testing / experimenting.
4. Implementing any of possible "real hardware" of wide interest.

For step 4. i will obviously go with the mentioned hardware i own, but here, when the time commes i would also like to hear feedbacks from any other users that would like to go with some similar / own hardware, and even implement the support for certain device of interest. So the whole thing will be opened for collaboration and new, creative ideas.

Well i choosed RS232 because the station i own is using it. I know more or less any newer weather device is using USB, and usb support on sgi's is quite unknown to me. For now will be very hard to trickle with usb protocols etc. but one day, why not (see step 4.)

For the end, sorry to all i was maybe unclear. This software is not collecting data from the web, it needs external hardware to function, in the form that is often available to all home / hobby weather enthusiasts (aka. personal weather station)

Best regards.

Well, if it was me... I don't know if any from my above statements sounded like critical, but if that was the case, then let me tell that nothing more far from the reality... in fact maybe I was too anxious... but this is something I can't fix... you know, as soon as I discover a project to command/control any kind of new hardware with IRIX... the beast emerges... ...at least for me, does not matters at all if it uses DIY hardware, or of the shelf hardware. Either if it is a weather station, or the control for an equatorial mount for a telescope... if it includes new hardware and software, I'm interested.



Exactly!



Very cool. The GUI looks very nice, and the entire project looks attractive in excess. Thanks by share it, and looking forward to watch the first testings!

awesome proyect! keep it up!

I don't know of any home weather stations made in the last ten years that didn't use USB for it's interface. That generally then strikes out almost anything older than the VW line of systems as they don't have USB support. I got a complete weather station here that completely useless with this awesome software simply because it's USB.

Instead of complaining you could help him write support for it. :p

Anyway most of those wireless stations become useless when one or more sensor spent one winter outdoors and stop functioning. To start feeding the software with real data, you can get a cheap multimeter with RS-232 opto-isolated output like the DT-4000 that is useful with this data logging code at http://studenti.fisica.unifi.it/~carla/ ... 98/marsh.c . ELV.de sells it 39.95€ . It comes with a temperature probe, or can measure a Pt-1000 resistor with longer wire. Later, more analog sensors can be multiplexed through some relays and a cheap parallel port interface. HtH