Outside At Last

I finally got all the sensors mounted on the station pole and wired up.  I mounted the weatherproof box and installed the anemometer board and hub inside it.  I ran all the wiring and I dressed and secured it with wire ties.  Then I ran a test over several days with the station inside to make sure it all still worked as expected.  That test went well, with no errors reported by the software.  I’m finally ready to move everything outside.

I pounded my outside mounting pole farther into the ground, as it had become loose, making sure it was vertically straight,  Then I clamped the weather station pole to the ground mounted pole.  So far so good.  Time to wire it up.

Looking everything over, the network cable was still intact.  The power cable to run 12V DC to the sensors was cut.  The ground rod was still intact (it’s inserted about 4 feet into the ground and would be hard to remove) but the ground wire from the station was cut as well.  I spliced the cut in the power wiring, and made a Y adapter out of Anderson Power Poles to split the power between the hub and the fan.  I had a spare Power Pole to 2.1mm adapter cable, but the 2.1mm connector was too short for the jack on the hub.  A trip to the local Radio Shack was pointless, as they were out of stock on the connector I needed.

As a test, I temporarily ran an extension cable to the back yard and plugged in the power supply I had been using indoors.  Then I moved the Guruplug and other assorted hardware to the new location in my basement.  After starting up the computer I saw that everything was working fine.  No errors reported in the log, and my Web site is being updated as it should be.

I’ll need to disconnect things until I get the 2.1mm connector I need and make an adapter cable.  I still need to make an adapter cable for the fan as well, but at least I have the parts I need for that.  Then I will run a ground for the lightning detector, orient the wind vane to North, and lock the wind vane into position.  Just a little bit of work left to do and this weather station will be back on the air.

Update: I enabled the upload of my weather data to the Citizen’s Weather Observer Program (CWOP) as they do some analysis and error checking based on the data collected from the NWS and other nearby stations.  For the short time the statiom was running my data analysis looks good as well.