My old weather station conked out and I bought a new LaCrosse Technology WS-2811-IT Wireless Professional Weather Center.

Nice unit, provides indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, rain, wind direction and velocity (solar powered with battery for night). The display accumulates weather data with time and date stamps.

It also provides a USB dongle and Windows software, called Heavy Weather, to communicate with the display unit and view current weather and weather history, control the display and the like.

I've been looking for Linux software that will, at least, download history data and, if possible, display weather information similar to the Heavy Weather software. So far, haven't found any packages for the 28xx series (I run Win7 is VirtualBox, that works, but, you know, rather have Linux than Windows).

Does anybody know of a software package that may be compatible with the weather station? Even better does anyone have experience with installing and running a compatible package?

Thanks for any advice.

Since no one has replied I would guess and the fact that a quick search also found nothing that you might be stuck with running windows. I would be curious if linux recognizes the USB dongle. I'm guessing a zigbee or possible bluetooth device.

The dongle is branded, has an FCC ID OMO-USB, has a model number, serial number and Make in China.

When I first plugged it with Win7 running it downloaded driver software, click the USB icon in VirtualBox, it sees it, click on it and turn it on and start the weather software. It works with Win7 and I suspect that it'll work with Slackware if I fiddle for a while but I don't really know that yet.

The weather software will give me a CSV file, that'll work with either MySQL or PostgreSQL but it would be nice to have a "ap" to submit weather data to sites that share.

Probably no software anywhere, just thought I'd ask, thanks for the reply.

I thought I read in the manual that no special driver is required so it must be some generic device. If you could figure that out you might be able to attach it to an existing linux module. However, reverse engineering the communication protocol would be difficult...

http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/ind...topic=42619.15
https://fccid.io/OMO-USB

I kind of figure that the dongle is generic -- it's just an RF transceiver after all, no smarts to speak of, I would think. I'm going to do a little experimenting back and forth to see if it'll talk to a wi-fi router, which I kind of expect will work (how well, well, I dunno; only one way to find out).

I'm going to keep looking around to see what there is to see with open source software that already communicates with La Crosse Technology weather stations. One might just be wview (http://www.wviewweather.com/) and there look to be some others. I can't imagine that La Crosse didn't use pretty much the same communication protocols across the product lines, maybe a twiddle here, maybe a fiddle there, but unique to each model? Probably not. Their heavyweather software works will all their wireless weather stations so it might not be as difficult as it first seems.

This is starting to sound like a good winter project; winters around here last for a while.

So, thanks for the input and have a good one.

If you read the second link I posted the RF frequency is 900MHz and so not compatible with WiFi. I don't think you have to worry about the RF link.

Oh, nuts.

Yeah, I do kind of know that the FCC set aside the 900MHz frequency for this class of devices and kind of forgot that wi-fi isn't in that band. Probably would have figured that out real quick when nobody talked to anybody else.

Thanks for the reminder.