Jim's blog

My weather station (link above) appears to be working properly but the outdoor temperature axis seems to have fixed on -80C as a lower limit even though the records for the day don't have readings that low.



The battery of the old laptop that the Irox ProX plugs into has been flashing its status lights at me for a while so I unplugged it yesterday. It's old and stuffed. However I don't want it connected directly to my web server and it uses less power than an old desktop. I do have an old single board computer in a box that is a viable and smaller alternative. I need to set up some cables to hook up an external IDE CDROM to install software on it. Its got a PIII processor of some sort I think and 128M of memory so should be OK for the console version of WeatherDisplay logging to a local database.

Yesterday was a fine summers day in Wellington with a good strong breeze blowing. I spent most of it on my friend Gordon's yacht, an H28, sailing on the harbour. We had hoped for about 15-20 knots for a pleasant cruise around to Island Bay and back, however it was more like 25 gusting 30+ so we stayed in the harbour, headed across to Eastbourne, up to Day's Bay and then to Somes Island where we anchored for a swim and lunch.

I had a play with my Olympus u770 waterproof camera a bit while swimming. It's hard to use underwater without a mask to clearly see the screen through so most of the underwater photos are a waste of time and the visibility was poor anyway.


While I was swimming towards the shore, a small dolphin popped up beside a boat moored a short distance away from us. I headed towards it and then back to the boat to get a better view but it disappeared.

With two reefs in the main sail we headed home as fast as we had come across the harbour with only one reef in, and with much less weather helm.

Anyway - a very good day out.

My weather display software is logging outdoor temperatures as low as -80C at times now. Given that our NZ summer rarely gets below +10C its obvious something is pretty bad. The desktop display seems to read OK. Not sure whether its the software or the Irox ProX station returning the wrong data.

Also the desktop display unit has its temperature sensor reading stuck on sensor 3 which is in my spare bedroom. It won't cycle around the other sensors as it used to. I can only cycle around them manually using the remote. May need to consult the manual on that.

In another area my Owl remote power monitor appears broken. Have checked the batteries and reset it so I'll need to check out how to get a warranty repair done.