I’m baking bread and preparing for a family dinner this evening (after the football game.)

I wrote Davisnet and they sent me a replacement part — a reed switch, which is a magnetic sensor. It’s small. I had to solder the ends of the reed switch to a pair of wires. It wasn’t easy. It’s a tiny space and I was doing the soldering outside. I needed another pair of hands.

However, I do now understand how the rain sensor works. Water is collected by a funnel and it drops into one of two cups. When the cup is full, the cup tips over, dropping the water while a second cup rises into position. At the bottom of the mechanism holding the two cups is a magnet; each time the cups swap position the magnet swings over the reed switch and it signals an increment of 1/10th of inch of rain has fallen.

I tested out the new switch and it seems to be working. Unfortunately, the weather station is reporting rain today, so now I have to figure out how to zero out this data.

So here’s first light and last light for December 15th when the official sunrise is 7:20am and sunrise is 4:48pm.

There’s something to like about the grainy, rough focus of these webcam photos. The blueness of the morning photo is abstract, standing on its own.

The older webcam is still in operation. It was set to take a picture at noon every day. This webcam is a Panasonic netcam and it’s connected to the network. It uploads a picture to a Panasonic site (which has changed hands more than once) and then is transferred to my site. I forgot how it worked — but it’s been doing its job since 2008. The netcam software that controlled it was on a PC that crashed recently. I was surprised to find the webcam working and then realized it wasn’t even connected to the PC.

So here’s a little more light today, catching a pastoral scene in low quality and odd coloring.

I have a David Vantage Pro 2 Weather Station. I have a console connected to a PC (via a serial cable), and the PC runs Weatherlink software from Davis. Weatherlink allowed me to publish information from my weather station to the Pillow Road website as well as register the weather station with Wunderground.com. The PC died a quiet death in late October and I really didn’t want to replace it. I really wanted to connect the weather station through a Mac because running Weatherlink was the only thing I needed the PC for. Davis does produce Weatherlink software for the Mac but it’s too expensive and by all accounts, not as capable as its PC software. I also thought the display for the PC version was rather ugly. So I had to find new software that would read the data from my weather station and create a better report.

After trying several demos, I ended up choosing WeatherTracker. I had to buy a serial-to-USB cable to connect the console to the Mac and only WeatherTracker recognized the weather station. (It was just a lot of tedious work trying different drivers and diving into support forums.) However, now I have it up and running. I like the basic display, which I see in the local application window, and I’m publishing it as a screen shot on the website.

You can find the current weather page on Pillowroad.com. You can also find my weather station listed as KCASEBAS10 on Wunderground.

Weathertracker is from AfterTen Software and costs $40. I like what its creator, Dean Davis, had to say about the software he writes and the company he started: “Since 2001 I’ve been creating software for the Macintosh that I wanted to use. Then I decided to see if anyone else wanted to use it. Much to my surprise they did and AfterTen Software was born.”

There was a break in the rain this morning but it rained off and on today – about a third of an inch. I walked around checking on things and I took some photos.

From one report, it’s the largest amount of rain to fall in October since 1962.