I’ve been enhancing the software that I use to read data from my weatherstation. It’s been working well since I added some extra code to detect when the sensor readings are obviously corrupt (radio interference, uncontrolled concurrent memory accesses, etc), but the tracking of the wind direction was still not quite good enough.
To improve that, I’ve extended the number of readings used in the running average, and enhanced the algorithms that average the wind direction to take into account not only the direction of each data point (unity vectors), but also the speed of the wind in that direction (true vectors).
The result seems to track significantly more accurately to nearby high quality stations, but I am conscious that this is still presenting a manipulation of the data, rather than the actual data that a better sensor would provide. Having said that, it’s now producing a pretty good result for hardware that cost me only £50.
The software can be downloaded from here.
