Creating a Virtual Weather Station with LabWindows/CVI

Author(s):
Ed Edelman - Ambient, LLC

Industry:
Consumer Goods

Products:
LabWindows/CVI

The Challenge:
Creating a Virtual Weather Station software package that connects digital weather stations with a PC serial or USB port.

The Solution:
Using the National Instruments LabWindows/CVI user interface to display the weather with an array of dynamic and colorful gauges, dials, graphs, and charts.

Introduction
Ambient, LLC is a retailer of weather station and environmental monitoring equipment. Typically, digital weather stations measure wind speed and direction (anemometer), rainfall, temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. They can also have wireless temperature and humidity sensors to monitor sensitive environments such as computer server rooms - generating audible and e-mail alarms.

We created Virtual Weather Station, a commercially available software package, with LabWindows/CVI. The Virtual Weather Station connects digital weather stations to a PC serial or USB port to display, plot, and store data for comprehensive monitoring and analysis.

Displaying Data on the Web
Virtual Weather Station uses the powerful Internet Toolkit in LabWindows/CVI. The software is completely integrated with the Internet, displaying real-time data on Web pages, as well as sending e-mail weather reports and alarms when environmental limits are exceeded. To display the data live on the Internet, LabWindows/CVI automatically converts its graphical images to jpeg files and sends them to the Internet. Using LabWindows/CVI FTP client functions, it also converts and sends Web pages and Web cam images.
The Internet Toolkit also includes smtp e-mail features that provide real-time weather reports and environmental alarms to remote pagers.

Integration and Connectivity
The compiler in LabWindows/CVI easily integrates with the Microsoft Visual/C++ compiler, so Windows API drivers, such as the RAS API for dial-up connectivity and the Windows Internet API for http read and write functions, can link to the LabWindows/CVI programming environment.

Virtual Weather Station uses the Microsoft APIs to connect and gather data from more than 6,700 weather sites throughout the world. The station posts and shares data on several free weather servers using these Internet API functions.

The ActiveX components in LabWindows/CVI can connect to other automation systems, so users can control thermostats, fans, and other automation equipment based on weather and environmental conditions.

Results
The graphical interface of LabWindows/CVI was ideal for creating the virtual instrumentation look and feel. With its superb graphical user interface foundation, software prototyping took a fraction of the time. The high-level, Internet toolkit commands and easy integration in Microsoft API libraries provided a flexible Internet solution. Now, thousands of customers around the world use Virtual Weather Station, including the U.S. government, businesses, and personal weather station owners.

With the easy-to-use graphical interface of LabWindows/CVI, we developed our software in approximately five percent of the time compared to traditional development platforms. Our solution has helped Ambient become one of the leading resellers of weather station equipment on the Internet.

For more information, contact Ed Edelman Ambient, LLC tel 818-865-1507 e-mail ni@weatherconnect.com. For a FREE 30-day trial, visit weatherconnect.com/download

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