How To Setup a La Crosse WS23xx Weather Station
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Specifications:
- Outdoor temperature range : -21.8°F to +157.8°F
- Humidity range : 20% to 95%
- Power consumption (base station): 3 x AA, 1.5V batteries or
AC power :
INPUT 120V AC 60HZ (adapter unit included)
- Power consumption (thermo-hygro sensor): 2 x AA, 1.5V batteries
(or can
draw power from the adapter if used)
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Setting up your La Crosse WS23xx weather station is a fairly simple process.
- Pick a good open location
- Find a mast to mount your wind and rain sensors on
- If you go wireless make sure you've got Line of Site between your transmitter and station
- Seriously consider replacing the included RJ-11 phone cable with a more weather resistant
setup like Category 5 twisted pair cabling
- Lubricate all external moving parts with a good PTFE based lubricant such as Super Lube
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Before you rush out and mount everything at its intended site, take a couple minutes to connect
each of the sensors to the Thermo-Hygro transmitter, and put batteries in it and the station.
After a couple minutes the LCD display should start receiving updates from the transmitter. The
easiest way to tell that things are working is to watch the various outdoors readings. The
"--" initial values will start changing to reflect current conditions.
You should pour a little bit of water into the rain sensor and blow into the wind vane. The goal
here is to just make sure everything is working. Once you've done that and you are comforable with
your setup, then take it to its intended location.
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Connecting your weather station to your PC
Its simple enough to get your WS23xx weather station connected to your PC with the included serial cable
and Heavy Weather © software. Once you get past its bells and whistles you'll discover that it really
doesn't do much. There are other 3rd party software packages out there that work similarly.
I tried all of them and eventually threw in the towel. Since I write software for a living and have a bit
of RS232 programming experience it didn't take me too long to have the making of my own communications
library up and running. Back in 2003 I made my first release of ws23xx.dll. It was a Visual Basic ActiveX
library and exposed around 28 of the weather station functions.
I soon had a Windows Service running that would poll the station every minute and write the responses
out to an Access database. The library wasn't perfect, but it gave me the flexibility I needed to present
my weather data in the format I desired.
Hence, weather.shellware.com was born.
Towards the end of 2005 I decided it was time to upgrade the services and libraries I'd built to rely soley
on the Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework. This opened up a few new options for the library, the most important
being a Microsoft supported Serial Communications API which provided it a much needed improvement
in reliablity. Along with the API improvements came a number of other benefits, notably decent try/catch
exception handling and Threading in Visual Basic.
And then I went to work on the front-end. I focused on the front-end because I needed a way to
test the changes I was making to the underlying library. I'm a big proponent of Test Driven Development, and
before too long ws23xx Viewer was doing a lot of the bells and whistles stuff that all the other
3rd party packages out there do. I think one exception is that I intentionally left out all the ugly,
unintuitive, and bulky gauges and dials.
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You can learn more about ws23xx Viewer and the ws23xx Communications library by visiting
the Project page that I maintain
for them. It's free software and if you're a programmer you can download and modify the source code so
long as you abide by the terms specified in the included GNU General Public Licence.
Last Updated: January 21, 2006
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