Station Information
The station is powered by a Davis Vantage Vue weather station. The data is collected every few seconds and the site is updated every 10 minutes. This site and its data is collected using WeeWX v3.9.2 Software running on a Raspberry Pi 2. The station is comprised of an anemometer, a barometer, a rain gauge, and a thermo-hydro sensor situated in optimal positions for highest accuracy possible.
The weathercam images are taken from an Hikvision IPC-B121H-M IP camera powered over ethernet using a cron script which captures an image from the live stream, resizes it and then ftp's it to the website using ffmpeg every two minutes. The camera is mounted on a pole alongside a Davis Anemometer Transmitter Kit which transmits to the Davis Vantage Vue receiver.
About the Website Design
This site is based on revised version of a template design originally by Blaues Ledersofa and updated by Josh Smith to the current CW9009 version available on Github.
I've made quite a lot of changes to the template with many additional tables in the station records section, imbedded satellite images, webcam images, windy.com weather etc. I've also added a page which includes the Bracknell Fax charts from the UK Met Office which are uploaded every few hours to the NOAA ftp. I have written some cron scripts to pull the TIF images every few hours (shortly after release), convert to png, resize, rotate and re-upload to this websites ftp for display.
Status
WeeWX uptime: | 7414650 seconds |
Server uptime: | 7414700 seconds |
About the Station Location
Loughlinstown is a small suburban area to the south of Dublin
Loughlinstown was inhabited from at least the Neolithic period when the megalithic portal tomb at Cromlech Fields was constructed circa 2,500 B.C.
Following Henry II's conquest of Ireland the lands around Loughlinstown were granted to the Anglo-Norman Talbot Family. By 1541 they had been granted to Goodman Family, who held them as "warden of the marches" protecting the southern border of the Pale from raids and incursions of the Wicklow Septs.
An 1654 survey describes the area as containing 458 acres, of which 300 acres were the property of James Goodman, who acted as Provost Marshal of the Irish Confederate Army during the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The remaining 128 acres were the property of the Dean of Christchurch.
Loughlinstown was granted to Sir William Domville, Attorney General for Ireland, in the reign of Charles II and James II. The Domville family held the lands for three centuries until 1962 when they were sold to Sir John Galvin.
In 1975 Loughlinstown House and Commons were the subject to a Compulsory Purchase Order by the then called Dublin Corporation(now Dun Laoghaire - Rathdown).>
Local information taken from Wikopedia
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Station History
- 07/06/2024 - Moved to a new hosting package, fixed the display of the NOAA reports to show as a php page, fixed the uptime to display long format instead of seconds.
- 19/04/2024 - Added a frosty days count.
- 05/01/2024 - Added "Average Wind Speed and "Washout Days" tables to the records page. Rejigged the colour pallete on the "Days It Rained" table so it now has a greater gradient making it easier to read. Concluded that I cannot create a windy days count table due to a bug in the historygenerator.py file which i'm unable to fix sadly.
- 01/12/2023 - Satellite link stopped working so replaced it with a nice widget from Meteoblue which has moving images and various other options available. Also added a couple of wind tables in the records section (max sustained winds and max gusts). Working on adding counts of windy and windless days, so far my code isnt working for that..
- 28/05/2022 - Corruption of the OS meant i could no longer update properly. Replaced the Pi2 with a Pi 3b and installed dietpi running Debian 11. The "current" fax chart sizing was wrong so took the opportunity to fix that. Website restore had a few challenges as some of the scripts needed ajustment for Debian 11 but all seems to be working now. WeeWx is now running on Python 3 (before Python 2).
- 04/04/2020 - The super nice creator of the template this website is based on updated his version of the historygenerator.py file (used to make the records tables)to include summaries on my request. Thanks JS! I also changed the records tables to start from 2013 as the page length was getting unwieldy
- 28/03/2019 - Changed css to stop fax chart resizing which was blurring images slightly, removed three minute auto refresh on pages. Going stir crazy due to coronavirus lockdown..
- 28/12/2019 - Added timestamp to fax charts, somthing I've been planning on doing forever but never got round to doing.For some reason couldnt make imagemagick add these to the png file format so had to use jpg which resulted in bigger filesize but not excessively so.
- 21/12/2019 - Added cold days table to the records section. I decided on max temperature threshold of 8C simply because that seems cold to me, no other reason. I also changed the table colours for the warm days as well. If I have some time over Christmas may finally get round to constructing an PI powered air quality monitor and will pull that information into the website eventually.
- 20/12/2019 - Added max rainfall rate by month table to station records section. I'm considering adding a cold days table if numbers are interesting, maybe days below 5C max perhaps. Windy.com rain/wind map embedded on index page during last month also as well as webcam and other images refresh fixed by htaccess setting.
- 17/11/2019 - Enabled data and Webcam image upload to Wunderground and the UK Met Office Weather Observation Website. This is mirrored on the Irish Met.ie website as "WOW-ie".
- 26/10/2019 - Changed the old webcam to a new one as water ingress was continual. Also updated ftp script as it wasnt uploading webcam images properly. Changed homepage code to hopefully always serve up current image (prevent cached one viewing by default).
- 22/04/2019 - Dried out weathercam after rainwater had ingressed, sealed up as well as I could with silica gel, self-amalgamating tape and duct tap, if that doesnt keep it dry inside then will replace the camera.
- 23/02/2019 - Added a DS3231 hardware clock to the Pi for better reliability.
- 07/06/2018 - Migrated site to new hosting to facilitate https (forced by impending Chrome changes in July 2018) hosting. For the most part seems to have gone smoothly and suprisingly easily (famous last words!).
- 01/06/2018 - Removed old data java script as it was always report old data on Internet Explorer with some lunatics still use. Added Bracknell Fax page to the site. This took quite a lot of work but am reasonably happy with the result. Would like to time stamp the charts with date uploaded to the NOAA ftp but only way I can think of doing that is by doing a directory listing on the ftp which the NOAA admins specifically ask not to do, will investigate alternate methods.I have purchased the loughlinstown.ie domain as well and intend to migrate to that eventually using https which my current hosting plan doesnt allow and is quite expensive to do so, so will investigate other providers. Hopefully should be easy enough to move the site over..famous last words he said..
- 31/05/2018 - Fixed some table code, changed some "fontawesome" from template (thermometers, email,satellite,weekly). Worked on script to automate downloading Bracknell Fax charts from the NOAA ftp, resize, shrink and change to png and then reupload to website ftp using cron. Next to work on slide show to display.