I haven’t added a blog entry for quite a few months now.  The weather station has been performing well on “auto-pilot” for all of this time and I have no complaints.  But there were some nagging issues with the software I finally got around to correcting.

The first issue was that it didn’t handle cases where it was unable to retrieve a valid forecast from the NWS very gracefully.  At least not in all cases that were occurring.  I had some error checking in the code, but I was able to improve on it quite a bit.  Now when the software is either unable to retrieve the forecast or it determines that the forecast XML might not be valid it retains the prior forecast, saves the error information in an error file, and does a retry the next time the forecast is requested.  Prior to making this update it was possible for the software to fail parsing the forecast XML.

The second issue was not really a problem, just an enhancement.  When the software retrieved weather advisories sometimes there were additional details available.  The software now retrieves those details when available and formats the display a bit more cleanly.

The third issue was that there was no password protection on my page that received the weather data from my weather station server.  It previously did some minor error checking in an attempt to prevent malicious people from uploading bogus data.  The page is now password protected which adds a bit more protection from receiving bogus data from an unknown source.  This is certainly not iron-clad security, but it is quite a bit better than the security scheme I had in place before now.

I will get around to uploading the newer files to the site as soon as I can.  I see that a few people have downloaded the software.  Hopefully you found it useful.