Shelly Park is in the Howick area, which is situated in Manukau City, Auckland, New Zealand.

Cockle Bay, Somerville and Meadowlands are the neighboring suburbs.

The weather station is fully automated and records the most important weather information. The Weather information is collected using Maxim (Dallas) 1-Wire Sensors. Data is transferred from the 1-Wire Sensors into the dedicated Weather PC via serial cable. The data is collected and turned into useful information like graphs, high-low trends etc and then uploaded via FTP to the Webserver. The content of this Website is powered/managed by Drupal, an open source content management platform which runs on Apache, PHP and MySQL. The Weather PC is a custom built Pentium 4 2.66GHz with 1GB Ram, Running Windows XP Pro. Software used is Weather-Display which is developed near by on Awhitu Peninsular, Auckland, New Zealand. 
 

 

The Maxim 1-Wire Sensors provides the Weather Display software extra functionally and information.

We have found the accuracy of the La-Crosse WS-2350 not as good as we would like. By using 1-Wire sensors we can get the accuracy higher. For example the Barometer on the La-Crosse WS-2350 can change dramatically with temperature changes. When we connected up the 1-Wire Barometer and placed the unit in a location where the temp does not change as much and we have got near perfect accuracy when comparing with the Auckland Airport and other local stations. The La-Crosse WS-2350 is now not used anymore except for the readings on the console and as a backup.

The other benefit of 1-Wire technology is that you can place your sensors in just about any location you can run Cat5e (Network) cable to. You are not as restricted as much, by default the La-Crosse WS-2350 Wind Sensor comes with 10m cables. We needed longer cables to connect it up to the Thermo-Hydro Sensor & Transmitter. We had to dismantle the Wind sensor to solder the new longer cable in. Most of the time www.hobby-boards.com 1-Wire boards come with 2x RJ-45 (network) sockets on them. This makes it easy to connect new sensors in the Weather Station. The second RJ-45 socket enables you to daisy chain the sensors which becomes one long string of sensors.