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Revision as of 14:53, 15 December 2012

What is "meteobridge"?

Meteobridge is a small device that connects your personal weather station to weather network "Weather Underground". This allows you to store your micro climate data at Weather Underground and to have it there visible from wherever you are. All you need is Internet access, to reach Weather Undergrounds web pages, where you can inspect your current and historical data. By that you can also share your weather data with friends and you are actively participating in a large network of weather enthusiasts who also share their weather observations with you.

Picture below shows how your weather station gets connected to Weather Underground with the help of Meteobridge, which bridges the gap between your weather station and your router.

Why don't take a regular PC for this?

Of course, instead of using a meteobridge device, you can also connect your weather station to a PC and install SW there that uploads data to Weather Underground. Many people do that, but it demands you to

• run a PC 24/7 which adds energy costs, heat and noise and beside cost is also an unpleasant waste of energy, which is not so nice, when you care about the environment
• install and configure SW on the PC, setup is not something done in 5 minutes
• take care of you pc really running undisturbed 24/7, which is normally not the case for your office PC

To overcome these disadvantages of a PC solution, meteobrigde steps in by providing a very cost effective solution with unmatched low demand of energy (below 2 watts) and without generating noise or significant heat. As Meteobrige does not fulfill demands of true weather enthusiasts, who want all data stored locally and doing their own graphing of that, it is extremely simple to set up and will run completely hassle-free. Just install it in a few minutes and then totally forget about it. You will not find a smaller, easier to use upload device for Weather Underground.

What makes meteobridge special?

The idea lined out above is very easy so you might ask, why hasn't something like that been created before. To make this idea work you need a cheap platform, powerfull enough to run such code plus a development environment to put the application code on top and you need application code that supports a lot of weather stations, to make it a solution suitable to a broad range of customer situations. Recently, these building blocks have come together:

• small and cheap router devices from TP-LINK building the HW platform
• a stable OpenWrt Linux port for this hardware which supports LAN and WLAN
• the applications software stack from smartbedded which is used with Meteoplug devices (www.meteoplug.com)

Meteobrige is simply speaking putting these building blocks together and giving it a specialized purpose to feed Weather Underground with your weather station's data.