Arduino Wx Station to Web and APRS

So this is fun.

I use the present tense because it's already been a fairly long-term project and the end isn't quite within sight. I've been working with Arduino microcontrollers for a few years now. Becoming a licensed ham radio operator has opened up a whole new world of applications for these little gems. I even bought the book "Arduino for Ham Radio", published by ARRL and authoerd by George Popiel, KW5GP. This is a guy after my own heart.

I'm not sure why weather is such a fascinating subject for hams. Perhaps it's due to its unpredictable nature and potentially devastating effects. This certainly ties into the emergency communications aspect of ham radio. And of course, gathering weather data also means we need more gadgets. I think that's the real appeal for most of us. In any case, In September of 2015, I ordered the book and decided to take on the task of building an Arduino-based weather staton.

Like I said, it's been fun. Naturally it wasn't enough just being able to view my weather data on the cute little monochromatic Nokia 5110 display. I wanted to share it with the world (like the world really needs another 2-bit weather station, right?). But my weather data is like so many other twitter feeds or facebook pages, except it's MINE.

So I dropped an ethernet shield onto the Arduino and wrote a little sketch along with a PHP script on my web site that would allow me to publish the weather data from the Arduino to a MySQL database. So I get a kick out of showing my students that I can visit a page on my web site that shows the weather at my house. Who cares. But it's been FUN.

Naturally, that's not enough for me. I want to push the data into the world of APRS. For you non-hams out there, that's the Automatic Packet Reporting System. It's a digital packet-based system for ham radio operators to communicate data such as their location and, among other things, weather data.

Well, the story continues. I've got my web site regularly updating the location of my Wx station with my call sign, and I'm looking into the weather data reporting API. This is all very niche stuff, and the servers that make it all possible are still running some old-school CGI, most likely PERL scripts or maybe even C code. Who knows. It's all very experimental and amateurish. That's because we're all amateurs, and, by definition, we're in this for the FUN, not for the money.

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