The majority of the weather data posted to this site is derived from Ambient's Virtual Weather Station software. This software provides support for a number of weather stations, including the Oregon Scientific and Davis Vantage Pro stations used here. Typically, a user only wants to use a single piece of weather station software, but in my case, I found this somewhat limiting.

I originally used VWS to read data from the Oregon Scientific station and post it here, I found the software did pretty much all that I needed. When I purchased the Davis station, I wanted to use VWS to read its data and post here with the same "look and feel" as that for the OS station. However, the Davis WeatherLink^® software supplied with the Vantage Pro station also has some nice features that I wanted to use, including some good trending and PC data archiving functions as well as a nice Weather bulletin screen. Things were further complicated by wanting to use the Vantage WeatherLinkIP data logger to post data directly to the internet. Unfortunately, the data logger cannot send data to the internet at the same time as the Weatherlink software is connected to the console via TCP/IP. So, I needed to be able to connect a number of software packages to hardware that only supported one active connection and needed to periodically disconnect that software to allow the internet updates to take place.

I thought that it would not be possible to handle these seemingly incompatible requirement until I came across a great utility from Steve Hatchett called VirtualVP. This software was written to allow a number of programs to communicate concurrently with a Vantage Pro weather station through a number of emulated serial ports. Although it did not originally support the IP data logger, support has just been added to version 1.1.5 currently in Beta test.

The user guide is available here, but the diagram below should help explain what's happening . . . .

The console is connected to the host computer running VirtualVP which emulates all of the essential functions of the WeatherLink software. In this case, the connection between the console and host computer is over TCP/IP with the host computer. VirtualVP then makes this data available to other serial or network connections and supports WeatherLinkIP by periodically briefly disconnecting VirtualVP from the console to allow the WeatherLink web site to be updated.

The window below shows the VirtualVP console display and shows VirtualVP communicationg over TCP/IP with the Vantage Pro console. The pane on the right shows four available emulated serial connections - two of which are used by the Davis WeathLink program and Virtual Weather Station. The other two serial connections are available for other connections and the four grey boxes indicate that an additional four network connections are currently not configured.