Greetings from Paramaribo, Suriname

[Luc]

Hi all,

My name is Luc Heijst, born 66 years ago in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I worked 38 years for the steel making company Hoogovens IJmuiden (currently Corus IJmuiden) at the process automation department. In my career I programmed a lot from PDP8 assembler to Pascal and the like. In 2013 I retired from work and moved with my wife to Paramaribo, Suriname (where she was born).

I got my first weather station, a TFA Primus, in april 2013. Not that I was so much interested in the weather, but more in interfacing a weather station on a computer. I searched for a weather program that would run on the Linux platform of my Synology NAS. The first weather program was Weather Frog, soon followed by WeeWX which I still use and adore. I helped exploring the TFA Primus protocol (WS28) and helped developing the WS28xx driver. I destroyed my TFA Primus console (put the batteries wrong side in!) and bought a compatible TFA Opus station. Also bought a KlimaLogg Pro thermo/hygro logger which used a similar protocol and co-wrote the WeeWX KlimaLogg driver.
After more and more units failed of my old weather stations I decided to go for quality and bought a Davis Vantage Pro. I helped someone in Germany to debug his Vantage driver for the TCP/IP datalogger. Great fun too was to decipher the raw messages send by the various Davis equipment received my the Meteostick device and so I became the co-writer of the WeeWX Meteostick driver. Currently I own two Vantage Pro 2 stations runned on a Raspberry PI2 with its software and databases remotely on my Synology DS211 NAS.

The graphical weather presentation by WeeWX is limited and not real-time, so I searched for better ways.
I managed to get a real-time version of the Steel Series Gauges operational, with 2.5 seconds interval time. Also real-time graphs via MesoWX which has it's local database on the web server (like Meteotemplate).

I experimented with the Saratoga and Leuven templates, but wasn't too exited about them.
Then someone draw my attention to Meteotemplate (begin 2016) and I was in love with this template from day one!
First I used my own database update program based upon MesoWX, but later I switched to the API version in combination with the WeeWX Meteotemplate uploader program. I assisted Jachym with parts of the API and data import programs. It is great fun working with him!

Besides weather station- and other programming my other hobbies are: listening to music, model construction, tower- and other mechanical clocks, photography, desk top publishing (I design the theatre booklets for Theaterkerk Wadway, a small theatre in the North of Holland, solely runned by non-paid volunteers! See: http://www.theaterkerkwadway.nl/ ). Last but not least: my dogs, gardening and raising chickens.

Cheers, Luc Heijst

[Jachym]

Thanks for joining us Luc and thanks for your continuous help.