Customer Reviews

Weather Toys: Building and Hacking Your Own 1-Wire Weather Station (ExtremeTech)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is an excellent primer to help you understand 1 wire devices and weather devices. I found that it helped motivate me in other directions such as bee hive monitoring in conjunction with the weather. The programs are good but it would be nice if they were available in alternate programming langauges such as C, C++, Visual Basic and a few others. I am not well versed in Java at this time so the alternate programming language would help greatly especially since I am in the process of doing remote wireless using the Rabbit microprocessor with ZigBee for the weather devices and the alternate languages would help the process. If you have a need to know about 1 wire and weather devices this book is highly recommended...

If you're into weather and interesting in rolling your own personal weather station, then this book is for you. I've had a blast building my weather station and am proud to say its up and running.

Great explanation as he incrementally builds up the java software controller.

Highly recommended!

This book is great. It really does herd you through creating a weather station. It has been a little while since it was written. Java has been upgraded. The Mac OS x file structure had changed a little. I had a hard time finding the specific serial port called for, but I got it all to work. Right now waiting on an order from China, then I continue into the build phase. The website / forum that supports the book is not the most active, but I think it is because people get their weather station built to the degree they want and move on.

The introduction to the Java programming environment is well worth the price of admission. This is for folks who want to build a real proefessional grade weather station and not just a toy demon.

This book is a must if you want to build or design your own weather station. It is also a good book for someone who wants to test or fix their existing station. It follows building your own weather program in Java. The main weather station that this book refers to using is no longer available. But changes can be made from online help to use the new version. Even if you purchase a weather station the chapters on setup and calibration are very good. I also like the ideas on interfacing the weather station to home automation and other applications.

I bought this book for a bargain price from one of the sellers on amazon. It has good information about how one wire sensors work. Also if someone is interested in Java this will break you into getting a sense of how that works. But there are some corrections that were made after the book was published, especially concerning how to list the onewire usb adapter. I had some problems getting it to work until I looked up the authors website and read some of the comments.
All in all, I probably would not buy a one wire weather station again because there are other weather stations that give you a lot more features for the price. But I would get the very inexpensive one wire temp sensors to play with as an introduction to such devices.
I did learn quite a bit from the book and am glad I understand what it takes to do java programming even though I barely scratched the surface.

A great book - very informative. Tim Bitson takes you step-by-step in both the software and hardware projects so that even the beginner can complete them.

I am not fond of Java. The book would have been of more use to me had the code examples been in VB or C#. The other problem I found with the software is that it was hard to locate. I had to dig around on the web to find a good link to the software files. I also had problems getting all the bits and pieces installed to get even one of the examples to run.

That all aside there is a lot of good information available in the book if you are building your own weather station.



I found the formulas that the auther used invaluable.