Mid Island shower or flurry this evening – then Dry and cold. Moving to Pi.

Light showers Tuesday – Evening rain or flurry.

There are some scattered showers lingering off the West Coast today as a weak system affects us.

The moisture will gradually move onto the Island mostly affecting the West Coast later today.

However. some rain will gather in the 4-7PM period in Port Alberni and the Valley and down the middle of the island to Cowichan and Duncan.

It is only a few mm but given the temperatures if the fog stays thick through the day it could fall as a flurry or wet snow in some locations. Be prepared just in case. The showers will not reach the east side.

Dry and cool until Saturday. Possible wet snow.

We will stay mostly dry and cool for the rest of the week with fog likely most mornings.

Things will start to change on Friday as a cold front begins to move down the coast. It will reach the mid and south Island by Saturday afternoon and evening. Here is the 4-7PM Saturday picture.

Rain and possible wet snow and wind will continue through the night Saturday. Snow is most likely early Sunday morning. It should depart Sunday leaving behind scattered showers or flurries.

Moving the weather server to Raspberry Pi.

The weather server that collects, stores, and produces the web data for alberniweather.ca has gone through many iterations over the years.

I started it on a very old PC computer running Linux. Then I moved it to a Mac Mini and later upgraded that Mini to handle both the weather and webcam duties.

I then moved it onto my iMac workstation in 2017 and yesterday it made another transition to a small computer called a Raspberry Pi.

As you can see, it is a tiny little computer. A marvel really of embedded electronics. Yet it is more than powerful enough to run the weather server and possibly the youtube/webcam stream all without a fan and consuming a fraction of the power of a regular computer at a fraction of the cost. About $70 for the computer plus $40 for storage on a 128GB microSD card, whick is likely a lot more than I need. Without the webcam stuff on it it could easily run using only 16GB of space.

It also has some really intriguing abilities to plug in to and work with sensors that could add interesting elements to the webpage. We’ll see!

For now, I have moved the weather data portion of the duties to this machine and today I will see how much of the webcam it can handle.

Always fun working with technology! Happy Tuesday!

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