by Chris Snell
+ +I work for Weathertools.com, here in San Antonio, TX USA. Among other +things, we sell weather stations that can be mounted on a roof of a +building. Some of these weather stations are wireless and solar powered +and are able to measure temperature, wind speed, wind direction, +barometric pressure and rainfall, as well as other things. We have a +demonstation unit up on our roof and I wanted to put some graphs of the +readings on the web. We've been graphing the readings using a +Windows-based program but its graphs just don't look all +that cool. I thought I could improve on them, so I scoured the 'Net and +found some software written by a guy +named Alan Batie from Portland, Oregon USA. His software (written on a +FreeBSD box) pulls the data from the weather station over the station's +serial port. Alan is currently graphing his weather +readings with MRTG but I wanted to take it a step further and graph mine +with RRDtool. So, I wrote a quick little Perl hack that reads the data +from Alan's utility and then sends the data, via a HTTP request, to our +colocated servers downtown. The HTTP request is made to another Perl hack +I wrote which runs under mod_perl. This script takes the readings and +stores them in an RRD file using the shared RRD Perl module, RRDs. +Finally, I needed a way to graph this data. To do this, I used a program +called Bronc, which I wrote last +year. Bronc reads its configuration from a template and then generates +graphs in real time (on-the-fly) using the RRDs Perl module.
+ + + +
+
+