PHP: Wunderground PWS from La Crosse Alerts

The code below can be reused to connect other types of weather stations, but it was originally designed to utilize undocumented features of the La Crosse Technology Wireless Weather Station with La Crosse Alerts (aka C84612).

Full tutorial is now available as a separate article “(HACKING) PROFESSIONAL WEATHER STATION FOR UNDER $100“.

Updated 2/10/2014:

  • Temp path moved to a variable instead (thank you, Mara and Ford)
  • Down alert default changed to 2 hours (La Cross internet update seems to be down just over 1 hour quite often)
  • Check for station itself being down (outside temperature reported exactly at 32 and dew point of 0)
  • Running script with ?output at the end would produce an output each time - helps troubleshoot otherwise successful runs
  • Info on delay in hours since last update always available on errors
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Textpattern 4.2.0

ILAsoft.net is now running Textpattern. Habari development and communication was not dynamic enough for me, so I had to switch. I wanted something new, something I have not tried before… Not overly user friendly, but overall the system seems to match my needs :)

Please visit http://textpattern.com/ to find out more about this Textile content management system!

Guestbook

The guestbook “Add” method has been fixed. The automatic (non-logging) IP-geocoding is now working- it should automatically zoom into the region from which the user IP has originated. If not, it will stay zoomed-out.

FYI, hostip.info is currently being used (one of the first good free IP geo-coders), but now there is a number of other free alternatives, like freegeoip.appspot.com for example.

Habari

ILAsoft.net is now running Habari, a state-of-the-art publishing platform! Habari is a community-driven project created and supported by people from all over the world. Please visit http://habariproject.org/ to find out more!

TWG Summary

NOTE: This modification is not supported anymore. TinyWebGallery is a great and powerful script that I enjoyed for many years, but I have since switched to SmugMug and do not follow latest TWG development efforts. Nevertheless, feel free to use this “hack”- it is still most certainly useful and easy to implement.
By just modifying five files (a total of around 25 lines added), you will be able to have your TWG Gallery produce “summary” pages, where the users will be able to see multiple medium-sized pictures, without having to go into each picture every-time. A must for high-bandwidth users/sites.
This article assumes you are running an unmodified version of Tiny Web Gallery script version 1.6.3. If you are running a different version, line numbers and code might be different.
File Comparison done based on “Araxis Merge File Comparison Reports” by Araxis Merge.

As always, remember to do a full back-up of the system or at least backup all the files you modify:

Click here to see full File Modifications step by step in an easy to read format.