Your browser is running a java applet that creates an object that establishes a TCP/IP communications link to a C program called wx200d that is running on our Linux server here at Holiwill Central. Compiled versions of the java applet awtweather and the java object wm918 were both downloaded to your browser then you opened this page.

wx200d collects data from our weather station, an Oregon Scientific wm918 wm918 that has external sensors for wind, rain and temperature which collect data that is then distributed via the serial port on the Linux server and broadcasts this data to any clients that connect to it. Roughly every 10 seconds, the weather station outputs weather information (temperature, humidity, barometric preasure, etc) which is collected by wx200d and then sent to wm918. The awtweather applet collects the data from wm918 and displays it in your browser window. This collection cycle explains why you don't see live data for a few seconds after the page is opened.

The awtweather applet uses the java AWT (Abstract Windows Toolkit) for the GUI, this tool kit is the least functional of the two java GUI toolkits (AWT and Swing) but is the one supported by the majority of web browsers. The applet uses Threads to schedule the screen updates every 5 seconds. The wm918 object uses the socket class to establish the TCP/IP connection to the server, Threads to allow the object to wait for TCP/IP traffic as well as answer requests for data from the applet and various utility classes to extract and format the data from the server.

All the text in blue above has been collected and displayed by a Java Applet. The images above and this explainitory text are plain old HTML.

If you are interested in a nice graphical (but static) representation of this data you can find images from the software that came with the weather station here. These images are updated every 30 minutes by a piece of windows software called Weather Lab from Ambient Software.

From time to time we activate our webcam to collect images from our site, the last image we captured can be found here