serial data from Weather station forwarding to the APRS system

[STWB]

Hi all,

I have an idea to foward NEMA sentences from a Weather station to the APRS system.
The NEMA sentence is no longer than 80 characters.  I may be mistaken but that would be 640 bits.  Is this too large for the serial interface card?  I would poll this data about once every 10 minutes.  APRS is a ham radio network sharing position, weather and messaging traffic.

STWB

[iobridge]

What is an example of a post to the APRS system?

[nick]

Along a similar vein, I have been working on a project to use the IOBridge to upload from an Oregon Scientific weather station to Weather Underground.  Basically the data comes from the weather station as a formatted serial stream and is uploaded to Weather Underground by a HTTP GET.

I have been using an Arduino to parse the serial data stream and compose the HTTP GET command which is executed by the serial API.  However, a much more graceful solution would be to have the weather station connected directly to the IOBridge and have the translation done on the IOBridge servers.  I would be willing to help with the implementation.

Nick

[ohararp]

I have also been coordinating to do this on both the hardware and ucontroller side. Definitely interested to learn more about your arduino project. Got any pics or other info?

[nick]

Sorry, no pics, there's not much to look at.

Here's what I have so far: the weather station is an Oregon Scientific WMR968.  Its base has an RS 232 port. Each time one of the sensors reports in, the base outputs to the RS 232 port a formatted stream with the sensor data.  The format of the stream is here: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/software/comms/wmr928.html

I have an Arduino (with a MAX232 serial inverter) that sits reading the incoming stream.  When it verifies that a complete packet has been received, it bundles it up into an HTTP GET request which calls a PHP page on my website, using the IOBridge, a serial smart board and the serial services API.  The PHP page logs the data to a SQL table.  Every ten minutes or so the PHP page calls Weather Underground and updates it with the latest value for each sensor.

The one tricky thing is the arduino only has one serial port but I'm connecting to two serial devices, the weather station and the serial smart board.  Fortunately both connections are unidirectional, I can use the receive pin with the weather station and the send pin with the iobridge and it works.

Nick

[iobridge]

Nick, that's a pretty cool setup.

Have you tried the softSerial library on the Arduino?