# Serial weather device



## toroamericano (May 1, 2012)

Just curious, where to look or a starting place if you will, for capturing data on a serial port. I have an older hobbyist weather station that I would like to capture weather data from and input into daily CSV files. There is a third-party application out there called Wview, I am unsure how to install it on FreeBSD. My experience with installing software has been limited to the Ports system. 

Running 7.4 Stable on an Optiplex 745 (older Pentium D 3.4, 2GB RAM)

Thank you.


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## SirDice (May 1, 2012)

You can use cu(1) for it. But perhaps something like comms/minicom is more familiar?


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## toroamericano (May 1, 2012)

I am not too familiar with either of those, I will read up on them. Thank you.


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## SirDice (May 1, 2012)

I would probably use comms/minicom to look at the traffic, see how it's structured. Then build something using perl or python to read that data and write out the CSV.


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## wblock@ (May 1, 2012)

wview will probably work fine, just change the serial port name.  Consider porting it.


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## toroamericano (May 1, 2012)

Thank you all for the replies. Looks like it is time to tinker.


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## jbjones (May 10, 2012)

I have wview running on FreeBSD 8.2. It compiled, installed, and configured quite easily. If you have any questions, let me know. My weather site has been active for just around 6 months. No problems at all. 

-JB


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## jbjones (May 10, 2012)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> wview will probably work fine, just change the serial port name.  Consider porting it.



I'm not sure how I missed this post, as I would have included it. At any rate, yes, it works wonderfully. I am now reading the porting docs. Perhaps I will have the time to send this upstream soon and help out. 

-JB


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