Davis Instruments

6310flw.jpg (53763 bytes) HCA 8 supports the Davis Instruments Weather Stations - both the Vantage Pro (pictured above) and the Weather Link II. Why use a weather station? You can create programs whose actions are based upon either current weather conditions or historic weather conditions.

Without a doubt having your own weather station is a very cool thing. Collecting data over time gives you the ability to do local forecasting and see weather trends over time. And that’s quite a lot of fun.

But wouldn't it be nice to do something else with your weather data? Like what? Well, how about turning on your sprinkler system only if it is not too windy and hasn't rained the night before? Or open a skylight if it gets too hot inside but keep it closed on cool rainy days? And for those of you in the cold climates, turn on pipe heaters if the average temperature in the last 24 hours is less than 40 degrees?

With HCA and a Davis Instruments weather station all these are possible.

While HCA uses the weather station for those sorts of automation decisions, it also can:

	Append to a log file the sensor data read every 'n' minutes
	Read a template file and produce a new file with weather data substituted for placeholders. One use of this is to make a HTML file that can be available from a web server.

In HCA there are two ways to interface to the weather station:

	HCA can read directly from the weather station when connected by a serial cable.
	HCA can read a file produced by another program that is connected to the weather station. Supported programs are WeatherLink, Weather Display, and Virtual Weather Station.

More information on the Davis Instruments weather stations can be found here.

How HCA uses weather stations is described in the HCA User Guide Weather Appendix.

Support for weather stations is in the Plus and Pro flavors of HCA.

The Davis Instruments Vantage Pro is available from SmartHome as well as the Weather Link II from SmartHome also.