About this site

This web site reports weather and video pictures from my vacation home, "Storm Haven", in Loveladies, NJ, on Long Beach Island.  Originally it was strictly for my own use, as a way to keep an eye on the place when I am not there, but in July 2004 I "went public" with it in order to share the weather data with anyone who might be interested.    In late September 2004 I substantially modified the hardware setup in order to be able to operate the station remotely, and in particular to be able to reboot the hardware remotely.  This page was revised on 9/27/04 to reflect those modifications.  Further modifications were made in August 2005, and those also have been noted.
 

Weather Station

The weather station is a Davis Wireless Vantage Pro® with Standard Radiation Shield.  The sensor suite is mounted on the roof of my house, about 33 feet above the ground.  The console is equipped with a Davis WeatherLink data logger, which stores observed data and transmits it to a computer running Davis WeatherLink 5.5 software.  Update 8/26/05:  Now running WeatherLink version 5.6 Beta 3.
 

Camera

The original camera was an AXIS 2100 Network Camera installed in a Pelco enclosure.  On February 21, 2005, this was replaced with a Toshiba IK-WB11A network camera mounted under the eaves of my house.  The advantage of the new camera is that the user can remotely pan and tilt the camera, and there is also a digital zoom feature.
 

The Toshiba IK-WB11A is in many ways a nice piece of hardware, although it has a reputation for unreliability. The biggest lack is not in the hardware, but rather in the built-in software. Like other webcams, the camera incorporates a webserver, which serves pages for viewing, controlling, and administering the camera. Those pages contain Javascript which sends control codes to the camera. To view the camera images, a Java applet is provided.

There are several problems.

• Toshiba provides no documentation on the interface, either with the camera or online. The posted email address for developer queries does not respond.
• As far as I can tell in the absence of documentation, there is no way for the individual user to specify an image size (320x240 pixels, 640x480 pixels, etc.) There is an administrator's page where the image size can be set, and it applies to all users.
• In sending an image, the camera times out after a few seconds. This means that dial-up users, and others with slow connections, cannot get complete images. Even broadband users cannot get larger images (such as 1280x960).
• When the camera times out (see previous bullet item) the provided Java applet appears to hang up.
• The camera-provided viewing page makes use of pop-up windows, which are blocked by most modern browsers. In addition, the onscreen controls often do not display correctly, and there is no on-screen help.

For a while I was using a page provided by camerawebpage.com, which solved the problems in the last bullet point, but not any of the others. The camerawebpage site has a tendency to go down frequently, especially on weekends.

In September 2005 I solved most of the above problems. I installed a nifty and inexpensive program called ImageSalsa on the on-site computer. Every second, ImageSalsa retrieves a 1280x960-pixel image from the camera on the local network, and creates resized copies of the image at various sizes. It then adds a timestamp to each of the resized images, and serves the results through a built-in webserver. I wrote an ASP page for viewing the images, which uses CamStream, a Macromedia Flash movie written by Dr. Tim West, to display the streaming video. The page uses Javascript to send control codes to the camera.

Update 4/27/06.  Thanks to Mike Williams, who sent me this Software Development Kit manual for the camera.  My own attempts at decoding the Toshiba API are here.

Computer

The computer which reads the weather data from the Vantage Pro, and periodically transmits it to this site, is a 120 MHz Gateway running Windows 98SE.   Update 8/26/05:  On August 18 the computer was replaced with a Compaq Presario running Windows XP Pro.

Lightning detector

In August 2005 a lightning detector was installed.  It is a StormTracker from Boltek, pictured at right.  The software being used is Astrogenic's NexStorm.  The antenna is mounted in the attic of my house, and points 71º  west of true north.

Other hardware

The computer and the network camera are linked to each other, and to the Internet, by a Linksys Model BEFSR41, which combines in one device a 4-port switch and a NAT firewall/router.  The WAN side of the router is connected via cable modem to Comcast's High Speed Internet service.  The router, the cable modem, the camera, and the Vantage Pro console are powered by a UPS, which should keep these devices running for several hours in the event of a power outage.  The computer, the camera, the router, and the cable modem are each plugged into an X-10 appliance module, and an X-10 Touch Tone Transponder is plugged into the telephone line, so that each device can individually be turned off or on remotely using a touch-tone telephone. (The computer is set to boot up automatically when power is turned on.)

Update 8/26/05.  The computer now has its own UPS.

Software

At present I am using the WeatherLink 5.6 software provided by Davis.  Every 10 minutes the software sends weather data and current graphs to the web site, and in addition sends weather data to Weather Underground and to the Citizen Weather Observer Program.  Every hour the software generates and uploads the graphs for the "Weather History" page.

Other software on the computer includes NISTime, which keeps the computer clock synchronized with a time server at the National Institute of Standards, and Radmin, which allows for remote operation of the computer.

Update 8/26/05.  Lightning detection software is NexStorm by Astrogenic.  The images from the Toshiba camera are now buffered by ImageSalsa.

The internet address for the router is stormhaven.dynalias.org.  When Comcast changes the IP address, a program on the computer called DynDNS Updater updates the DNS server.

The website is maintained with Microsoft FrontPage 2003, with some hand-coding of scripts and ASP.

There is more detail here about the variables which the weather station transmits to this site.

More details

If you are interested, I would be glad to tell you more about my setup.  Just send me an email with your questions. (There is a "Contact me" link below, but if you have JavaScript disabled on your browser, you cannot see the link.)

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