[Weather] Interesting little weather device

[Rich Mulvey]

Hi All:

   I thought some people may be interested in these little weather 
devices:  
http://www.houseofdeals.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1716 

   They're fairly interesting as they are - they use a pager network to 
grab a 5-day forecast for your local area.  But for the hardware hackers 
around here, the *really* interesting part is that you can disassemble 
them and extract the data radio and weather interface chip.  Full 
details of how easy it is to interface to it via an RS-232 interface can 
be found at http://www.ambientdevices.com/datacasting/AMB-4001-W1.pdf - 
so you can use the guts for your own weather forecast display system.

   And best yet, you can get them for $9.95 each, instead of the $995 
that Ambient charges for a developer kit.  :-)  Even though the website 
says that they don't offer individual sales, I had no problem ordering 
them.  There is a minimum of $25.00, so I bought 3.  I figured I could 
use one for its intended use, and  then use the remaining two for 
projects.  :-)

   I'm planning on intergrating one into my Zigbee weather display 
module, pictured at 
http://www.mulveyfamily.com/projects/remotedisplay/display.jpg .  I 
already have it grabbing a weather forecast from the net and displaying 
it on the bottom line, but adapting one of these units would make it 
completely stand-alone.

- Rich