Select Station

This tab allows to define the weather station Meteobridge is connected to and should read data from. Meteobridge allows to handle multiple weather stations in parallel and makes combined use of sensors from different stations for doing graphs etc, which is a rather unique feature.

Primary Station

This tab allows to specify the primary station connected to your Meteobridge. Standard setups will just have one station defined as "Primary" station. You can add more stations with the "Add Weather Station" button". This allows to make use of an additional station, here a Davis AirLink station. Just press "Add Weather Station" and select the additional station model as well as the other settings needed for the new station. By pressing "Save" you finally add this station to your setup. From now on you have an additional tab (named "Station 1") on your tab list. When you want to remove the added station from your setup, simply press "Remove Weather Station" and you are back to making use of the primary station only.

Station Selection

Meteobridge does not provide an automatic recognition of the station being connected, but when you click on the "Model" drop-down box Meteobridge tries to give you a hint which stations are in reach.

• A "no-entry" symbol in front the model name indicates that Meteobridge thinks the station is currently not connected (example: Gill Windsonic)
• A green check mark symbol indicates that Meteobridge thinks the station is connected (example: LabJack)
• In situations Meteobridge can't say, no prefix symbol is shown (example: NBIOT)

The list of supported stations is rather long and also depends on the Meteobridge hardware you are using. When you are with a NANO then you don't get stations offered to be connected via USB, because the NANO does not provide a USB port. In that case you are limited to the Davis console or Envoy the NANO is plugged into and stations you can connect to via TCP/IP.

Meteobridge PRO/PRO2 and NANO offer a "use internal console connection" or "use internal RF receiver" checkbox. This checkbox should be enabled unless you don't want to make use of these signature features of the NANO or PRO/PRO2.

Limitation on USB 1.x Stations

Please be aware that Meteobridge client hardware from TP-Link (TL-MR3020, TL-MR3040 and TL-WR703N) and D-Link (DIR-505) is not able to run USB 1.x devices directly, but needs a small cheap, unpowered external USB 2.0 hub in between, which translates USB 1.x from your weather station to USB 2.0. Please check list of supported stations here, to learn in which situation you need a USB 2.0 hub in between. As USB 2.0 hubs are available all around and do just cost a few dollars, this should be a no brainer.

Station selection

Meteobridge supports the most popular weather stations in the market. Stations with a serial RS232 interface can be connected by a cheap RS232-USB converter. Converters with PL230x, CP210x and FTDI chipsets are supported by Meteobridge. There are Prolific PL23Ax converters in the market that are wrongly advertised as being PL230x and which are not supported by Meteobridge. Therefore, going FTDI is the safest way which also makes using a USB hub unnecessary.

When you use multiple station connected via USB serial you have to choose the most distinctive identifier in the "Device" select box. An entry like "/dev/ttyMH113" specifies a certain physical USB port of your Meteobridge. When you use this, Meteobridge cannot mess up between all the connected USB serial devices. When you just have one USB serial device connected, "/dev/ttyMH" will be fine as the physical USB port the station is connected to does not matters as there is just one station and when you connect your station to another physical USB port it will still work.

"no restart of logger when lacking data from this station" should be used when using multiple stations and you want to avoid to cycle to a reset of all connected stations when one station does not provide data anymore. Sometime a complete shutdown of the USB drivers can help to resurrect a stalled USB connection, but to have also the stations doing fine impacted by that might be something you want to avoid. It might be a good rule of thumb not to set this mark on the primary station, but to set it on additional stations where missing data might not be that vital.

Additional weather station tabs also offer a "remove weather station" button which can be used for removing this tab and settings again. The next paragraphs lists weather stations that have some specific settings when being used with Meteobridge.

Davis Vantage Pro and Vue and Envoy

These stations can be equipped with a USB logger or an TCP/IP-based logger from Davis (WLIP) or a compatible clone. You can select with "Connection" drop-down what type your Davis logger is. If you are on Meteobridge NANO hardware, connection will be of serial type with nothing to choose from. When you connect to a WLIP you have to enter the IP where to reach the WLIP in your LAN and you can specify if the WLIP device should be given time slots to upload data to the Davis Cloud service in parallel to feeding your Meteobridge with data. Example below connects to a WLIP at IP 192.168.123.227 at default port and should allow uploads to Davis cloud every 5 minutes. When your WLIP is not operating on default port 22222, you can specify a dedicated port number like 11111 by giving "192.268.234.227:11111" as IP.

When you have a serial data logger you can map that to USB by a FTDI or PL2303 based serial to USB converter. When Vantage is connected via USB to Meteobridge please make sure that baud rate of Vantage is set to 19200, otherwise no connection can be established. Since Version 2.5 Meteobridge allows parallel use of the Vantage by a PC program, which connects to the Meteobridge on port 22222 (like with a Davis IP logger).

When you select these stations an additional input area will appear, where you can configure basic settings of your Davis weather station. Apart from the date/time synchronization these configuration settings are just applied once. Doing these initial setup within Meteobridge spares you to fiddle manually with the console or with the Davis PC program. Picture below shows which settings can be made. If you need more detail to understand what these settings do, please consult you Davis manual. In the example below the main Vantage ISS sensor is received on transmitter ID #3, while the additional temperature/humidity sensor is received via a repeater sending on channel A and on transmitter ID #1. This sensor is mapped to the additional temperature with ID #1 in the data protocol of the console. Additionally, the received data will be retransmitted by the console on transmitter ID #2.

Davis WeatherLink Live

When you connect to a Davis WLL you need to specify which sensors you expect being connected. The attached example specifies an ISS connected at transmitter ID #3 and with a rain bucket size of 0.2mm. You can add more sensors by the "add transmitter" drop-down box.

Meteostick, Meteobridge PRO red, Meteobridge PRO2

Meteostick needs selection of a RF band to work with. Please select the setting that matches your geography. Davis sells stations with distinct frequency bands for US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In addition you also have to define an RF sensitivity. Please make sure that that is about 10db more sensitive than signal level from incoming data. When you see data coming in on "Live Data" tab with -70db for example, then -80db is a good sensitivity level. Increasing sensitivity of the receiver too much will collect tons of RF noise which will disturb picking up valid data significantly. For normal Davis operation "normal bandwidth" setting is best. If you want to work with signals retransmitted from your Vantage console, please switch to "via console" to limit dropped packets.

The "Add Transmitter" button allows you to select a station number (which is the transmitter ID your station is using). Having done that, an empty station field will be added to the list of stations and you are asked to specify what kind of station you like to add. Available station types are

• ISS: the default sensor array with or without solar and UV sensors, you are also asked to specify rain resolution of the rain bucket in stalled
• Wind: can be with rotating cups with wind vane or new ultrasonic. Only standard cup sizes are supported, if you have different cup sizes, you might need to calibrate wind speed on "Station - Settings" tab. Same is true with wind sensor data with in the ISS.
• Rain: you need to select installed rain bucket size.
• Extra Temperature or combined Temperature & Humidity sensor
• combined Leaf/Soil sensor array or Leaf only array, or Soil only array
• 3rd party sunshine duration sensor, which is connected to a Davis transmitter module as a fake rain station
• extra UV & Solar station, or UV only, or Solar only

When you have made the selection, please press "Save" to make it permanent. When a station should be removed, select station type "none" and press "Save". Example above shows a configuration of a Wind station on transmitter ID #1, an ISS on ID #3, a Temperature station on ID #4 and a Leaf/Soil station on ID #7. Meteobridge uses the schema explained below to give sensors a consistent naming:

• First ISS is taken (here ID #3) and its sensors are mapped to "th0", "wind0", "rain0", "uv0", "sol0"
• If a dedicated Wind station is found (here ID #1) the wind sensor from this station is assumed to be the primary one, so it is mapped to "wind0". Wind sensor of ISS which has been formaly mapped to "wind0" is remapped to its station number, here "wind3".
• A dedicated Rain station is handled like a Wind station and sensor name "rain0" is applied to it.
• The first Leaf/Soil station in the list is mapped to sensors "th10", "th11", ... , "th18". Follow-on Leaf/Soil stations are mapped to name ranges "th20, ..." for station ID #1, "th30, ..." for station ID #2, and so on.
• Temperature and Temperature/Humidity stations are are mapped to "thX" resp. "tX", where X is the station ID.
• Additional Wind/Rain/ISS stations have their sensors indexed with the station ID, like Temperature and Temperature/Humidity sensor mentioned before.

Davis Weatherlink Cloud

This allows to read data that a Davis station has stored into the Davis Weatherlink cloud. In general the preferred way is to read data direct from the station as it is far more often updated and more recent. But in case you have a Davis console that does not allow to connect to, reading the uploaded data back from the Weatherlink cloud might be the only option to feed your data into Meteobridge. To achieve this, you need the "V2 key" and the "secret" Davis has provided to you. Please separate both with a "+" sign or blank and insert into the corresponding field.

Acurite Internet-Bridge (depreciated)

This can only be used when Meteobridge is connected to your LAN via WiFi as it needs the LAN port to be directly connected to the Acurite Internet-Bridge by means of an Ethernet cable. Furthermore, "LAN Bridge" option on network tab must be enabled, to allow the Acurite Internet-Bridge to connect to the Internet as before. Having done that Meteobridge will sniff weather data from the TCP traffic the Acurite Internet-Bridge will pass through Meteobridge. Sniffed data appears in Meteobridge the same way as from the other weather stations.

Remark: As Acurite no longer supports the needed cloud connection of the Aculink Internet Bridge this is no longer operational unless you imitate the canceled Acurits cloud service with some home-made surrogate, which is more on the nerd side of things.

Ambientweather/Fine Offset

These stations are availbale with or without UV/solar sensor. The drop down behind this type of stations allows to control if Meteobridge should try reading UV/solar data from it.

Ecowitt Custom Upload

Some Fine Offset / Ecowitt consoles do not provide a local API but allow to upload data to a custom server. When the URL "http://ip-of-your-meteobridge/public/ecowitt0.cgi" is specified in the console, Meteobridge receives data from the station and can work with that. To allow multiple consoles to feed data to Meteobridge the endpoint of above URL includes the station number. When it is the primary station of Meteobridge "ecowitt0.cgi" has to be used, when it is the primary station of Meteobridge, then "ecowitt0.cgi" is the correct endpoint, and so on. The URL to use in your specific setup is display in the "Connection" section of your station definition.

Lufft WS600 WS700 WS10

These Lufft stations come with some options you need to select from. Please choose between combinations of

• with or without lightning detector
• 0.1 mm or 0.2 mm rain resolution

LabJack U3-HV/LV

LabJack modules are the Swiss Army knife when it comes to log any voltage or frequency or counter data. Logged data will be assigned to "data" items in Meteobridge and can be graphed or further processed in various ways. This is very helpful in experimental environments and when connecting raw weather data sensors that do not provide digital protocols but communicate via voltages. count signals or frequencies. The line configuration section allows you to configure the LabJack input ports.

NBIOT

Meteobridge PRO2 with NBIOT module can log data at remote locations and send it into the Meteobridge NBIOT Data Hub in the Internet. Easiest way to make use of this data is to configure another Meteobridge to read data from there. When doing so you need to specify the MAC and the password as defined on the sending Meteobridge. MAC and password need to be separated by a "+" or blank. When receiving Meteobridge initially connects to the NBIOT Data Hub it needs to know how far into the past it should retrieve data. You can specify from "back to one hour" up to "give me all data, regardless how old".

User-Defined Station

Meteobridge can make of so called "User-Defined Stations" which are not weather stations physically connected but software scripts that simulate weather data. This can be used to connect not-supported weather stations by writing a Linux BASH script that reads data from the not-supported station and provides weather information on stdin in a generic way. There is a set of predefined scripts that are provided via the "Select Plugin" drop-down box. Plugin-in scripts can be referenced by a URL or in the local "scripts" folder on Meteobridge PRO, PRO2, NANO SD and RPI. To understand how such plugin-Scripts work you can have a look at this one which simulates a weather station with random numbers: Simulstation Plugin

Having selected and saved a new plugin station, please press "Reload Plugin" to make it available for processing.

Weather Cam

Meteobridge offered support of a Ubiquiti AirCam as a weather cam from the beginning. All you needed to do is to connect the AirCam to your LAN (or to Meteobrige's LAN port when configured in bridging mode as explained on Setup Network page), set AirCam selection mark, insert AirCam's IP and password ("ubnt" is factory default) and press "Save". If a red cross appears left to the selected mark, press "Initialize Cam" to configure cam in a way needed for Meteobridge. After that a green mark should appear. If not, please inspect error messages on top of page. Initialization of cam only needs to be done once.

You can check if the image is loaded fine into Meteobridge by clicking onto the camera symbol.

If you don't have a Ubiquiti AirCam (which is rather outdated today) connected but you have an URL pointing to a jpeg image that Meteobridge should take as weather camera image, you can use the "External Picture" option. Meteobridge reads the URL and uses the image for further processing and upload to weather networks. To use the image of an external camera might be interesting if you want to have your Meteobridge weather data added to that image. How to add weather data to an image is explained on Weather Cam Image Handling page.

Beside the Camera URL you can also provide a URL that points to a logo in jpeg format. Please press "Upload Logo" button once to have the logo uploaded to the Meteobridge server that does all the image processing for your local Meteobridge. How to embed the logo into the camera image is also explained in the before mentioned link.

Settings

There are a couple of adjustments to your station setup to optimize quality of your sensor readings.

Calibration

Meteobridge sensors can be calibrated by an offset and a factor which allows for any linear sensor value adaption. Please keep in mind that pressure and sealevel pressure are separate sensors in Meteobridge. Therefore, you have to apply the calibration to both, same with temperature and dew point. Example above adds 2.5 hPa to the pressure sensors and half a degree Celsius to the primary outdoor temp/hum sensor. Calibration can be done by selecting a sensor from the "add sensor" drop-down box and specifying the offset and factor values. Having done this pressing "save" is needed to make the changes permanent and operational. Sensor calibration is effective on the raw data and is effective from the moment you define it, but it does not affect already logged sensor data.

Station Altitude

It is important that you specify the station altitude. Meteobridge uses altitude information to compute sealevel pressure used by weather networks. You can specify altitude in meters or feet, please set down-down box for selection of "meters" or "feet" accordingly.

Tolerated Data Age

Meteobridge needs to know how long a sensor value should be regarded valid. Standard is 10 minutes, it is not recommended to go below that value. If your weather station does have RF problems with certain sensors that only change slowly over time it might be a good move, to increase the value. When you don't know, stay with the default of 10 minutes.

Historical Data Save Interval

On Meteobridge hardware without local storage (all flashed router platforms are in this category) Meteobridge stores cumulated historical data every 10 minutes to Meteobridge server to have this data saved in case of a power failure or unexpected shut down occurs. Default interval of "every 30 minutes" can be changed to less often intervals up to once a day. This might be useful to spare bandwidth, when your Meteobridge operates on a very remote location. When you are using a Meteobridge PRO, PRO2, NANO SD or RPI this feature of uploading data to a server in the Internet is not used for making data persistent, but local storage is used instead.

Rain Year Start

In some regions it is common to define the month where the "rain year" starts separately. Default is January.

Units

Meteobridge works with metric units on its GUI as default. You can switch to imperial units, if you like. Data storage is not affected by this, it just a display option.

Weather Network MAC

Some weather networks use the MAC of your Meteobridge to identify the sender. When you change Meteobridge hardware, the MAC will change and by that these weather networks will treat you as a new sender and will not connect your previously logged data with the data being received from the new MAC. In order to avoid this, you can manually specify the MAC being used for authentication at weather networks. "Reset MAC" button resets weather network MAC to the physical MAC of the Meteobridge hardware.

Wind Sensor

Meteobridge internal wind representation consists of a wind object that includes wind speed, wind direction and wind chill. As most stations do not deliver wind chill directly, Meteobridge computes this with the help of outdoor temperature data from the outdoor temperature sensor. Side effect is that Meteobridge waits for outdoor temperature data being available before wind data can be reported. In most scenarios this might just cause a little delay when starting data logging, until both wind and temperature sensors have delivered data. But when you have a wind only station connected to your Meteobridge, temperature data will not show up at all. To avoid output of wind data being stalled in this situation, you can select "not to wait for wind chill" data.

Serial USB Switch

Meteobridge has predefined scripts to toggle some standard USB relays. This can be used to turn on/off heating devices to keep the weather free from ice in low temperature scenarios. In order to control the USB relay these scripts have to know which USB port the relay is connected to. The dop-down menu allows you to specify the USB port.

Mapping

As Meteobridge can handle multiple weather stations in parallel you have to decide which outdoor sensor from wich station should be used to report outdoor temperature to weather networks. To facilitate these selections Meteobridge distinguishes between "physical sensors" (which have a name that corresponds to the weather station and the sensor enumeration for this station) and "logical sensors" (which are the sensors used for weather network reporting, graphing, export, etc). The tab below shows how phsysical sensors are mapped to logical sensors. Green entries are default. When you just have on weather station connected these defaults will spare you to map the obvious. By pressing "reset" you can always come back to the default mapping in case you messed up the individual sensor mapping.

Physical sensors are always named by the following convention:

• the sensor category (t, th, thb, wind, rain, uv, sol, air, ...),
• followed by station number (0 = primary station),
• followed by exclamation mark "!" as delimiter,
• followed by a sensor number (0 = primary sensor of the specific station),
• followed by a sensor type (temp, hum, dew, ...)

Therefore, "th1!0temp" is the primary temp outdoor sensor of station #1.

To add a new sensor mapping you first have to select a physical sensor from the drop-down menu. Next you can select from another drop-down menu the logical sensor this should be assigned to. When the assignment is done the list will update an highlight the just made mapping in red, so that you can easily check if the mapping was done as you intended. In order to delete a sensor mapping, just select the physical sensor in the drop-down menu and map it to "no mapping". This will remove the mapping for this physical sensor from the list.

Below you see a sensor mapping for a Meteobridge PRO2 with NBIOT module. Default mappings are shown in green, individual mappings are shown in yellow. In this case the pressure sensor from the additional station #1 is used as default pressure sensor (mapping "thb1!0press" to "thb0press" and "thb1!0seapress" to "thb0seapress"). Please be aware that Meteobridge sensors are decomposing into sets of sensor data and all this sensor data must be mapped. Here "press" and "sea press" must be mapped accordingly, some would be with "temp", "hum" and "dew" in case of a temp/hum sensor like "th1".

When you have a NBIOT equipped Meteobridge you also select in the NBIOT column which of the sensor data has to be uploaded to the Meteobridge NBIOT data hub. Meteobridge just allows to select 30 sensors due tue data volume limitations by the NBIOT provider.

When you press "Save" weather station selection is made permanent and data logger is restarted to adapt to the new settings.

Virtual Sensors

Meteobridge allows to define virtual sensors. Virtual sensor definitions are triggered when a certain sensor (called "trigger sensor") delivers new data. The triggered virtual sensor definition then computes the values according to the given computation rules and stores the resulting value as the virtual sensors value.

In a first step the sensor that should trigger to generate data for a virtual sensor needs to be defined. If the generation of data for the virtual sensor should be triggered by time events you can make use of fake sensors "every1min" to "every10min". Next the virtual sensor needs to be selected. Virtual sensors are assigned to a virtual station #8. When trigger sensor and virtual sensor are selected, next step is to define an expression that is used for computation of the virtual sensor data. To store this definition "Save" button needs to be pressed. "Reset" button deletes all virtual sensor definitions. The computation is using the same syntax as with Templates. You can use any template variables and you can apply math to them in terms of arithmetic expressions. Also conditional #if#then#else#fi# expressions can be used, like with templates. Virtual sensors can be assigned away from virtual station #8 to any other sensor name on "Station - Mapping" tab.

The definition for virtual sensor "thb8!0temp" above (which is triggered each time new data for "thb0!0temp" arrives) tells that the current value of "thb0temp" is multiplied by 1.3 and stored as virtual sensor value. The generation of data for virtual sensor "wind8!0wind" is triggered by "wind0!0wind" and the value to be stored is the minimum of the last 3 "wind0wind" readings. Putting the mouse over the orange "i" icons pops up a text that outlines most recent computation of the virtual sensor data.