The rain collector on my Davis Instruments Vantage Pro 2 has been broken for a couple of months and the temperature and humidity sensor died two weeks ago - it was time for some maintenance.

I ordered the Davis Rain Collector II from www.davisnet.com.au (

After months and months of ongoing issues with my Davis Station Vantage Pro 2, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase a new IIS motherboard from DavisNet.  I tried new capacitors with the old board but still had problems - it wouldn't hold a charge overnight.

The board can be seen (and purchased) from DavisNet.

A few months ago I successfully achieved the goal of publishing my weather station data to my local MQTT server. Now I had to decide what I was going to do with it.

Inspired

Over the last couple of weeks I have been writing a MQTT to COSM bridge. Unfortunately (I think because of COSM) it has only been staying up and running for a few hours at a time.

My original code is here:

Thanks for Mosquitto

Hi folks,

I've just written a WeatherCat to MQTT bridge using the excellent WeatherCat Applescript interface.

MQTT allows lightweight publish and subscribe functionality and is used for process control, Arduino projects and lots of other fun things. The bridge I've written uses the open source MQTT tool Mosquitto

 Last Friday we set a Wind Record of 76 km/h at our weather station at Merewether. I estimate that about 20 minutes after this record wind the rain collector of the Vantage Vue blew away! (It's the big black bit on the attached photo).

It's pretty big, about the size of a 4 litre paint tin, and is held into place with 4 plastic lugs

After months and months of frustration with battery issues with my Vantage Vue, I have now upgrade to a Vantage Pro 2 Plus. The 'Plus' bit means that we now have UV and Solar Radiation available.

Lets hope the Vantage Pro has a long and happy life.

Another new battery goes in - the second of Sanya Advanced Lithium II CR123A. The 'dead' battery had about 1V left.  Gee the Vantage View goes through them. I also applied di-electric grease on the programming contacts as per the suggestions here: www.wxforum.net/index.php

Let

Sadly the Vantage Vue is on the blink. It looked like the battery but I've replaced it twice. Hmmmm. Stay tuned!

I've just come across this great, updated, article  Sarah Wilson on tinned tuna http://www.sarahwilson.com.au/2010/04/which-tinned-tuna-should-i-buy/ . Interesting reading!

Also if you have any interest in sustainable seafood then you