[Xastir] Xastir and Ultimeter weather station

[Alex Carver]

--- Steve Jones <steve at mikeoxlong.net> wrote:
> On Jan 19, 2008, at 6:46 PM, Alex Carver wrote:
> > work.  Some of them are commercial so you'll be
> > paying.  I think one that's rather popular is
> Franson
> > GPSGate.  The Mac only has to run a program called
> > 'socat' which can turn a network connection into a
> > virtual serial port.
> 
> Looks like this is the solution for now.  Should be
> simple to implement.
> 
> Weather Display does offer a server port but I can't
> find what format  
> the data is in and Xastir doesn't seem to like it.
> 
> Perhaps in the future Xastir will support the
> wxnow.txt file.  It  
> appears that Winaprs, Ui-view and APRS+SA all
> support it.

I took a peek in Xastir to see how it supported
weather stations and I see it will either support a
serial port or a network port.  Still don't know the
format but I'll need to poke around to figure that
out.

Not supporting the 'wxnow.txt' file I think is
reasonable.  The idea is that Xastir can do a lot of
things on its own without depending too much on
external programs (though it's certainly extensible in
some respects).  Having Xastir directly handle reading
from the weather station ensures that some problems
are avoided such as reading a file that's being
written at the same time.  It also allows for the
display of the data as it's acquired instead of
waiting for the file to update.

According to the help file, it currently supports a
Radio Shack type weather station and a specific format
of ASCII as output (presumably by a Peet Brothers
weather station).  I don't know what the Ultimeter
puts out for data over the serial port nor do I know
the specifics of the two formats that Xastir
understands.  I imagine there may be a way to get the
Ultimeter to work in Xastir with some code changes or
data massaging.


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