smartbedded UG: Transfer of handling Meteohub licensing and invoicing to smartbedded UG is completely finished. I guess this did not put any harm to the Meteohub user base and is business as usual now. New developments will also be handled by smartbedded, but nothing to worry about.
Flash wear: Flash storage getting faulty over time is a key issue since I started with Meteohub on NSLU2. Doing intensive tests I can recommend the Patriot Xporter XT Boost 4GB as the best USB stick around - when it comes to durability. It takes an unbelieveable amount of write cycles and is cheap as well. Don't look further, take this one! Latest 4.9 stick image for iConnect does also solve iConnect specific cold boot issues with this stick (see posting viewtopic.php?f=52&t=8878).
EOL iConnect: End of life announcement of iConnect was an unpleasant surprise to me, as this platform is really great for Meteohub solutions. I personally put a lot of effort to get it hacked, to port a Debian to it and to get all the bells and whistles (LEDs, buttons) working. However, as with former NSLU2 the units are still available in Europe, but seem to be already out of stock in the US. I expect to have them for a long time available as 2nd hand on ebay. Nevertheless, I cannot hide to express some disappointment, that Iomega did decide not to produce it anymore.
Non-EOL on Sheeva: As SheevaPlug is there for a quite long time, some of you might argue, that it might disappear also some time soon. From the information I could get, it looks like this will not be the case. I have heard from someone doing tight business with them, that Sheeva will at least be there for 3 more years.
other NAS dongles: During the last years I recently did research about the next Meteohub platform. Full featured Linux-based NAS dongles like the NSLU2, iConnect always were first priority, as they are small, low power, have a capable ARM processor inside as well as some reasonable amount of RAM and offer ethernet and USB connectivity. Hacking these to make a fully-fletched Linux (Debian is my preference for Meteohub) is mostly quite time consuming, but it is always part of the joy to discover something new. As iConnect is EOL, I looked around and found the LaPlug from LaCie (also EOL from what I heard) and Silverstone DC01. As you can see from my latest posts, I have prepared Meteohub to be ready on DC01 with version 4.9f.
Silverstone DC01: Most exciting thing is, that this is the first Meteohub platform we can use a regular SSD with. No more dead SD cards and USB sticks, which could not stand the wear a 24/7 operation puts to them. I will add it also in the Hardware comparison charts.
Documentation: I decide not to continue to keep the PDF documentation for Meteohub up-to-date (which is pretty outdated right now). Instead I will add more documentation directly to the wiki. I started to put the installation/setup documentation for the different platforms there. Hopefully, this will make it more easy for you to setup a Meteohub with virgin hardware.
Speed of Development: Having a growing user and platform-base, service requests did grow over time. As a result my spare time for new development is more limited as I would like it to be. So if you feel my responsiveness is fading, it is not because I don't care anymore, but because of time constraints. I stiil try to keep up high responsiveness with severe issues, but can't solve every minor thing in short time.
New stations: From time to time I get some requests on addition of some outdated stations to Meteohub. Please understand that it does not make sense to develop a driver for that, when it just has let's say 5 users and declining. I try to support all important new stations. Something still on my list are the ones from AcuRite, but the USB communication on Linux for these is something to be completely developed from scratch. So it will take time. Really great (and already included into Meteohub) are the new RFXtrx devices from RFXcom, as these can now read data not just from Oregon sensors. Bert from RFXCOM is keeping me in sync with his new develpments on that, so Meteohub will step by step make all the possibilites of RFXtrx in regard to weather stations available to you.
That's it for the moment. Thanks for listening
