Among many other things I did over the weekend I got the weather station and webcam working at the Boomershoot shooting line. I created a web page for it so people can check out the conditions as Boomershoot 2017 approaches. I call the webpage Boomershoot Live! It will also allow people who are not attending to get a once a minute snapshot of the target area and weather.
Here how things looked yesterday morning when I was getting the T-Mobile microcell working:
Here is this morning:
Yeah. The weather at Boomershoot is variable.
The weather station uploads data to Weather Underground about four times a minute. They kept track of the weather history as well as make forecasts.
It’s too far away to make a believable forecast for Boomershoot (April 21, 22, 23) but in another week they will start being plausible.
Update: The webcam dropped offline at 3:00 PM PDT April 10th. I don’t know why. I’m over 300 miles away and won’t be able to check on it until April 20th.
Update 2: The webcam started working again at 6:07 PM PDT April April 10th. This was with a few minutes of when I told Barb I would probably buy a newer and better one and take it with us when we went to Boomershoot. Not that this had anything to do with it starting to work, but I thought it was amusing.
Looks like it’s up again, or at least (based on the timestamp) was, about ten minutes ago (boomershoot is PST, right?).
You also need to proofread the text. “This webcam on the east end of the shooting berm.” 🙂
Neat pic – the full size version looks a bit like an oil painting.
Boomershoot is PDT.
But yes. It is back up again. It came up at 6:07 PM.
I fixed the error.
Thanks.
Maybe point the old one north north east (cover all of the over-the-road approaches) and have the new one with the current orientation?
I don’t have enough power to run two webcams.
If / when you find a much more betterer weather station, please let us know. I’m still in the market for a good one, and I appreciate your testing regimen. I figure if it gets the Boomershoot Seal of Approval it’ll be worth investing in one.
The weather station is working just fine. It’s the webcam (completely separate from the weather station) which is marginal. It was very cheap. Only $50. It’s main feature of interest for me is that it is very low power. It draws less than 150 mA at 12V with the IR lights off (275 mA with them on). The quality of the image is marginal but good enough to see what the weather is and get some clues about the ground conditions. These were my main reason for getting it.
I do not recommend this webcam to anyone who isn’t an software or electrical engineer. The configuration was brutal. The phone app interface only gave you access to some features. The web interface, not mentioned in any of the documentation, only had access to some of the features. There was an intersection of the two feature sets but some feature only worked on one platform and other features only on the other platform. The union of the two feature sets was sufficient to configure it for my use but I probably would have been better off, money/time wise, to get a more expensive webcam. But the those I saw at the time were all much higher power consumption.