I recently bought a Davis VantagePro2 weather station. Naturally I want to get the data out of this on my Linux system, but when I looked at the available programs I discovered they were more targeted at presenting it in a web page than recording it for posterity.

Newer versions of 'vproweather' will save stuff in a MySQL database, but I looked at the code and concluded that I could go blind trying to add support for PostgreSQL to that!

So I downloaded the latest Davis Instruments Serial Protocol specifications from their website (Yay: someone who actually releases the docs on how to talk to their gear! :-) and made merry with some perl.

I've been doing Perl on and off for maybe ten years now, but I would say I am by no means an expert, so there are likely to be things that a real Perl guru would do better than I have here. If you are such a person I would love to see patches from you which will teach me to do it better :-)

Meanwhile, if you're a mere mortal like me, and wish to write Perl code or shell scripts to fetch and display data from your Davis Vantage series weather station then by all means download the code and use it to your heart's content. The code is licensed under the terms of the Artistic License v2.0, which is a fairly relaxed sort of a license.

Getting the Code

The source code repository is at http://gitorious.org/davis-vantagepro

Getting Help

I doubt there's going to be a huge rush flocking to use this, so just e-mail me if you want to submit a change. Or send me a cheque if you think it's so awesome I should be paid, and you don't want to leave the job to someone else.

You can also catch me in the #davical channel on irc.oftc.net if you have questions about it and want to chat.