[Xastir] WX station interfacing

[Rick Green]

On Sun, 2 Sep 2007, Rick Green wrote:

> On Sun, 2 Sep 2007, Rick Green wrote:
>
>> Last spring at Dayton, I splurged and bought myself a refurbished Peet 
>> Bros. weather instrument, an 'Ultimeter 500'.  It has a 6-pin rj-style 
>> connector on the side of the display unit, which according to the manual 
>> can be used for the optional PC data logger.
>  /snip/
> I eventually found some info on the peet bros. site itself:
>
> http://www.peetbros.com/HTML_Pages/faqs.htm
>
> Data is 2400/8/N/1
>
> Pinout is:
> 1 - special
> 2 - +5v
> 3 - Output
> 4 - N/C
> 5 - Ground
> 6 - Input(U2000only), N/C(U100;U800)
>
> My Ultimeter 500 appears to be an Ultimeter 100 with a built-in inside 
> temperature sensor.
>
>
>
   Additional (Critical!) information:  Peet Bros numbers their modular 
connectors Backwards from the way I'm accustomed to.  Looking at the 
female 6-pin modular, pin 1 is on the RIGHT with the keyway on the bottom.
  I've got a cable made up, and am looking at data with hyperterm on an old 
win98 machine.  Next step is to install a multi-port serial card in my 
linux machine so I can feed the data to xastir.
   Each data field is four ascii characters representing hex digits.  When 
I interpret the hex digits as a binary integer, it seems to make sense. 
Temperature is in tenths of a degree F.  I'm curious if they have a means 
of representing negative values?  From the manual, I see that Peet Bros. 
is a Florida company - maybe they didn't realize it sometimes gets cold up 
here!

-- 
Rick Green, N8BJX

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
                                   -Benjamin Franklin