Maplin N96GY(WH1080) WX station + APRS

During my trip back to Manchester last month, I've got myself a cheapo WX station. Sold by Maplin under it's Maplin Gadget brand with N96GY model, I made to understand by reading some of the documentation found in Maplin website, it is an OEM from Fine Offset Electronics which produces few variants of the WX station with USB connectivity. I was a bit hesitate to buy it at first since 1) it is cheap 2) getting it to connect to a router will be a hassle. After few more research, I found out that there is a package called FOWSR available for OpenWRT and the price paid might be worth it to get it up for a year or so before getting something better/more expensive.

Assembling the unit is a no brainer, don't think you need to look at the manual to get the outdoor unit assembled. I've got it mounted on my porch since my house only has a small garden. For those who're thinking of putting a weather station, you should follow the one suggested here:

http://wiki.wunderground.com/index.php/PWS_-_Siting

Anyway, the next hurdle is to get FOWSR to talk to aprs-is server. The FOWSR software was developed quite sometimes back and it hasn't been enhanced further. It supports the following format:

• Weather Underground
• PWS Weather
• pywws
• XML

Left from the supported format is the APRS/CWOP format. I was looking to enhance the FOWSR but I couldn't get some of the libraries to compile properly using OpenWRT SDK (couldn't find this lib: libusb-compat), I might need to get the full source and recompile everything. But lucky me, I found someone using the same weather station + fowsr and his WX packet can be found on the aprs.fi. Emailed the packet owner, Nick (VA3NNW) to get more information on how he got his stuff running and he sent me a perl wrapper code that will reformat wunderground format into APRS/CWOP format. Thanks Nick for your help .. my WX station is up and running now and can be found here:

http://aprs.fi/weather/?call=9M2TPT-13

BTW, I've a workaround to have the WX packet to back-feed into the RF, by using aprx. What need to be done is to put a filter in section and in the section. If I ever get the OpenWRT SDK working, I might use it to output into a text file and let aprx to beacon out from the text file, this will then get picked up by other igate and into the aprs.fi. But for now, my current setup is working just fine.

I've modified Nick's perl script a bit to output a file into a /tmp directory instead of sending it direct to the APRS-IS server. I'm using aprx to beacon out from this text file into RF and back into aprs-is from someone's igate. This is now work well.

Nick has changed a bit on how his scripting works now, he is using CGI. For those who're interested in Nick's perl script, do head up to his page at:

http://noseynick.net/wx/noseywx.html

MODIFICATION: Embedding GPS into TMD710A's head unit

My Garmin NUVI 350 has been intermittently giving me a problem which I believe caused by the power connector. For some reason, slight movement will cause the NUVI to loose it power. So, I'm retiring my NUVI, will still use it for day-to-day navigational (sourcing the power from the right side connector) and I've embedded a GPS module inside my TMD710A's head unit instead.

It is a straight forward project, that is after I did some "research" on the net and found few who've done it before. I based my mod from the this website: http://sq3fyk.com/?page_id=23

Here are the photos taken from the mod.

1. Scarifying my PS/2 serial GPS. Removed the casing, we're interested on the inner module which has both, the antenna & GPS receiver module.

2. Fully stripped, no only bare module & pig tails connector, left a good length of wires for the mod.

3. Trying to find the best place based on the website that I referred to, but decided that I don't want to loose the speaker.

4. Stripping the head unit, the volume & menu buttons etc, put them all into a safe container.

5. Okay, found the best place to stick the GPS, hopefully it won't fry the chip below it.

6. All wired ..  you can visit the website mentioned above on where the connection needs to be done.

7. Test it first before putting back the casing .. everything seems to work, no short-circuit.. :)

8. Done! Tested working, has been few months now.

Configuring TechniColor TG784N V3 (Maxis issued broadband router) to use different DNS servers

Previous write up deleted. It seems to change the DNS servers in as shown on the status, but it does not really work.

Check the following website, this seems to work:

http://www.o2help.co.uk/router-change-dns/

This can be done from the WEB GUI too, go into the following configuration path:

In my example above, I'm using paid service unblock-us instead of google public DNS servers.