Best station option for a Mac out of USB slots?

Posted on
Wed Mar 01, 2017 3:26 pm
Professor Falken offline
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Posts: 289
Joined: Mar 29, 2015

Best station option for a Mac out of USB slots?

I may have to join the WeatherSnoop forums for an answer on this, but I figured there may be enough Indigo users with informed opinions for me to just get the answer here.

I am considering adding a home weather station to my Indigo setup and monitoring it via WeatherSnoop and the plugin, if I can find a reasonable mounting location (and secure wife approval for the eyesore).

But I am out of USB slots on my Indigo containing MacMini. Between an Insteon interface, a superdrive (newer mac minis did away with optical drives), the UPS data cable, and an external HDD, most of which I don't think play nicely with a hub, I am not sure how I would connect the station's console to my system.

I see that Davis stations have a couple of options besides the USB version, have folks successfully used any of the non-USB solutions? Do they update fairly real time? Is there a better solution I am not considering?

Thanks.

Posted on
Wed Mar 01, 2017 6:13 pm
ELWOOD offline
Posts: 225
Joined: Feb 11, 2007
Location: Ramsey, NJ

Re: Best station option for a Mac out of USB slots?

Just add a USB HUB https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss ... ds=usb+hub

I have two six port usb hubs plugged into my mac mini with no problems. Have about 14 usb devices.

Have been using a Oregon Scientific wireless weather station for many years works well. The basestation has a serial output that I
feed to a serial to usb converter, that plugs into one of the usb hubs. My weather station is old and only works with weather snoop 2.
But still works fine with the weather snoop plugin.

The only thing with the wireless weather station I don't like is the wind speed. Mine only seems to send an average speed of the wind
so it does not show peek wind speed.

Elwood

Posted on
Thu Mar 02, 2017 6:54 am
johnpolasek offline
Posts: 911
Joined: Aug 05, 2011
Location: Aggieland, Texas

Re: Best station option for a Mac out of USB slots?

I have been using the wired Weatherlink IP option on a VantageView (the white shoebox all in one station) for years; I started out having it send directly to Davis which forwarded it to WeatherUnderground which I then picked up in Indigo. Once I found Weathersnoop, I started using that to keep the data locally and let it serve WeatherUnderground as well as Indigo. The only bit of advice is don't try to send to both Davis and Weathersnoop; when the requests overlap, it will hang the Davis Console. My WeatherUnderground station is:
https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KTXCOLLE34#history And the data dropouts you see in it are due to loss of satellite uplink during storms; I still have ALL the data locally and in Indigo.

Posted on
Thu Mar 02, 2017 7:49 am
Different Computers offline
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Joined: Jan 02, 2016
Location: East Coast

Re: Best station option for a Mac out of USB slots?

I highly recommend the Weather Underground plugin.

Then connect your weather station to WU and pull data from WU.

This worked GREAT for me with my BloomSky until the BloomSky unit died on me a second time. But that has nothing to do with the level of excellent development and high reliability I found with the WU plugin!

Now that I'm not going to try a third BS, I just changed the config of my WU plugin to use another guy's nearby weather station.

SmartThings refugee, so happy to be on Indigo. Monterey on a base M1 Mini w/Harmony Hub, Hue, DomoPad, Dynamic URL, Device Extensions, HomeKitLink, Grafana, Plex, uniFAP, Fantastic Weather, Nanoleaf, LED Simple Effects, Bond Home, Camect.

Posted on
Thu Mar 02, 2017 9:39 am
Professor Falken offline
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Re: Best station option for a Mac out of USB slots?

by johnpolasek » Thu Mar 02, 2017 7:54 am

I have been using the wired Weatherlink IP option on a VantageView (the white shoebox all in one station) for years; I started out having it send directly to Davis which forwarded it to WeatherUnderground which I then picked up in Indigo. Once I found Weathersnoop, I started using that to keep the data locally and let it serve WeatherUnderground as well as Indigo.



I think I like the sound of this. So the Wetherlink IP just makes the Davis console another device on your LAN, where WeatherSnoop can access it locally, then send it to both Indigo (via plugin) and WU? Seems like this would reduce latency on reporting of changing things like wind gusts. I am picturing the actual Davis console device will end up stuck in the computer cabinet and not be something I dig out to look at, as I can use phone/tablets to display via my Indigo control pages, right?

Posted on
Thu Mar 02, 2017 12:32 pm
johnpolasek offline
Posts: 911
Joined: Aug 05, 2011
Location: Aggieland, Texas

Re: Best station option for a Mac out of USB slots?

Correct; although we pulled cat5 from the server room to the breakfast nook where the console sits partly so we could look at all the data at a glance; however, we needed the connection and 4 port switch anyway because that's where we tie in the magicjack for the phone and hooked up a hardwire for the back door rPi rather than running it wireless. For me, the latency wasn't as big an issue as the fact that our satellite internet service drops out whenever heavy weather rolls in and WU underestimates the rainfall as a result if the storm occurs across the midnight reset. But once the data is in Indigo, you can do a whole lot of graphical stuff using Dave's and Karls plotting packages, for example a log based windrose:
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