I embraced my inner weather geek this week and purchased weather station software for my Oregon Scientific WMR968 station. I had been running it on a Windows machine until the laptop crapped out on me, leaving me in the eye of the hurricane, so to speak. So, in order to sidestep the dead laptop, I decided I wanted to try to more fully utilize an older Mac that we have in the house. Enter stage right, WeatherSnooper, the solution for me in that it is a Mac application, and it supports the weather station that I already own.
I made the purchase and, though it's still in the process of being shipped (Shipping? Really? Are they the only ones who don't download?), I decided to download the demo version to ensure I could connect up the station. This particular facet had me wondering, since the Mac only had USB inputs, and the WMR968 had serial output. Apparently not to worry, though, WeatherSnooper had links to two separate serial to USB drivers directly from the Help Menu. Saweet!
Working logically from top to bottom I tried them both to no avail. Discouragement ameliorated by several scream sessions, I did some additional investigations, and found that the drivers were specific to chipsets. But how do I find out what chipset my now 2-year old cable used? Once again, I called on Uncle Google and found a way to discover exactly which kind of chipset was in the cable I was using.
1. From the Apple, select "About This Mac"
I made the purchase and, though it's still in the process of being shipped (Shipping? Really? Are they the only ones who don't download?), I decided to download the demo version to ensure I could connect up the station. This particular facet had me wondering, since the Mac only had USB inputs, and the WMR968 had serial output. Apparently not to worry, though, WeatherSnooper had links to two separate serial to USB drivers directly from the Help Menu. Saweet!
Working logically from top to bottom I tried them both to no avail. Discouragement ameliorated by several scream sessions, I did some additional investigations, and found that the drivers were specific to chipsets. But how do I find out what chipset my now 2-year old cable used? Once again, I called on Uncle Google and found a way to discover exactly which kind of chipset was in the cable I was using.
1. From the Apple, select "About This Mac"
2. Click on the "More info..." button. If you are running Lion this brings up an intermediate screen shown below.
2a. Click on the "System Report..." button.
2a. Click on the "System Report..." button.
2b. If you are running an older OS, it brings up the System Profile/ System Information application directly.
3. In the left pane under the hardware heading, click on USB and you'll see something similar to what's below:
3. In the left pane under the hardware heading, click on USB and you'll see something similar to what's below:
Selecting the USB Serial Controller revealed that the chipset I was using was from Prolific Technology. No problem. Still following the instructions, I copied both the Product ID and Vendor ID and put them in another Google search. That led me to Prolific's website where I could download drivers. They had one specific to the OS version I was running, so yay! It looked like I might be in business.
Suffice it to say, I had several more scream-fests. Even the dog wanted to leave, and I even awed the parrots. After I calmed, I did yet more research and found another site with a link to a sourceforge download. Lo and behold, this actually operated like an OSX installer, and it freaking worked!!
So as soon as the real application gets here, I will once again be joining the throngs of weather nerds with personal reporting weather stations on Wunderground. On the surface, the application looks nice - a little hokey for my taste, but that's OK. I really wanted it so I can get back to uploading my data to Weather Underground.
Suffice it to say, I had several more scream-fests. Even the dog wanted to leave, and I even awed the parrots. After I calmed, I did yet more research and found another site with a link to a sourceforge download. Lo and behold, this actually operated like an OSX installer, and it freaking worked!!
So as soon as the real application gets here, I will once again be joining the throngs of weather nerds with personal reporting weather stations on Wunderground. On the surface, the application looks nice - a little hokey for my taste, but that's OK. I really wanted it so I can get back to uploading my data to Weather Underground.
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