News
Release 0.9.23 fixes some bugs in the graphing code. It also adds functionality to interoperate with the RTS2 remote telescope system
Release 0.9.21 fixes two bugs: console temperature calibration was incorrect for VantagePro stations and wind was not properly represented in the mapfile.
Release 0.9.20 adds the option to send meteo data to a RTS2 telescope control system. It also fixes many portability issues and modernizes the code. Long options are added to most of the programs to make commandlines more readable and service configuration files are included so that meteo can be more easily integrated with systemd on modern Linux systems.
Releases 0.9.18 and 0.9.19 were not public.
Release 0.9.17 adds another option to the meteopoll program. The -x option defines an outlet through which meteopoll writes the data consolidated every minute in XML format to the outlet. An outlet is either a file or a pipe, i.e.~a command startet each time a new batch of data is available.
Release 0.9.15 adds a new option to the meteopoll program. This option allows to write the current data received from the station to an XML file. Using a simple CGI program, this XML data can then be turned into a real time display of the weather data
Release 0.9.14 adds the the meteosunriset program to compute sunrise and sunset at the location of the weather station. For stations that cannot compute sunrise/sunset (all except the VantagePro), meteo can now compute sunrise and sunset and display daylight bars in the graphs.
Release 0.9.13 fixes a minor bug in meteobrowser.php, which caused no map when the temperature graph was not referenced. And it adds XML and XSL for gallery pages.
Release 0.9.12 fixes a security problem:
the system() call in meteobrowser.php did not
properly escape its arguments, and thus allowed arbitrary command
execution. Please upgrade or wrap the argument of each instance of
system in an escapeshellcmd call.
Release 0.9.11 fixes some more problems with the GroWeather station.
Release 0.9.10 adds the attribute crc to the station type
element. This attribute directs meteopoll to send a
CRC0 to the station to turn off CRC checking on commands.
Type E Weatherlinks always start up in CRC mode, and CRC checking must
be turned off explicitely for them to work with meteo. This means
e.g. that GroWeather is now a supported Station type.
Release 0.9.9 includes a defense against denial of service attacks on the meteo browser. Twice during march 2004 some crazy guy aparently from south america tried to download everything the browser could give him to read offline. Every call to a browser page starts several instances of meteodraw. As the machine as quite limited (2 50MHz processors, 200MB RAM), it quickly became overwhelmed. On one occasion it took 9 hours for the machine to handle all the load.
One protection is to limit the number of processes Apache may start, but that does not limit then umber of meteodraw processes that may ultimately hang around. Thus a new class Lock was included that limits the number of meteodraw processes that can be running concurrently, and the number of processes that are waiting to be run. By default, at most 3 processes can be running at the same time, and only ten processes can be startet simultaneously. This can be tuned through the attributes of the graphs element in the XML configuration file.
Release 0.9.7 solves a long standing problem: how to specify which values have to be averaged using what type of aggregation function. This information is now in the XML configuration file.
Development of release 0.9.0 was sponsored by the University Univates in Lajeado in Southern Brazil (State Rio Grande do Sul). I would like to thank the University for their generous support, and all the people involved for their continued help and encouragment.
The current release (version 0.9.23) was published on july 13, 2023. See the NEWS file for the most important changes in this release. For a complete list of changes, go to the Change Log.
Version 0.9.0 is a major rewrite of many aspects of meteo.
- New database structure: the wide tables used in previous releases have proved too inflexible when adding new fields. Dealing with a fully equipped VantagePro station would need a much wider table, a simple Weather Monitor would hardly produce anything but NULL values in such a table. The database now uses a very narrow table with a single value per row. See the README file in the db directory of the distribution.
- Configurable set of sensors: The configuration file now specifies the set of sensors a station is equipped with.
- Calibration: station data now is corrected with all the available calibration numbers.
- Extensible design: The software is now much better structured and adding new sensors or weather stations should be easier now.
Here are some highlights of the recent release history: Release 0.7.0 comes with a rewrite of the backend, and deals much better with missing data (NULLs in the database instead of special values, that loose their special meaning when averagin). Release 0.8.0 introduces a new graphing backend which is much more flexible than in previous releases.
Walter Poxon has contributed an Installation Howto (thanks Walter!), which goes into some more detail. He also wrote some scripts to upload weather data to the Weather Underground (these scripts no longer work with the new database, hopefully they will be updated in a future release). His work was for for a previous release, and some things have changed slightly, but it is still helpful as a guide through the installation.