AWS, the makers of the weather station that TJHSST has, are rather linux-unfriendly and do NOT provide a linux client. Jeff Grafton started on a linux client/server package, named JAWS (Jefferson AWS) for his senior techlab. Linux is a free operation system. It is also the TJHSST computer systems lab's primary OS.

Jeff decoded the serial protocol of AWS using a serial data capture program he wrote. He ran the program on a linux box between the AWS datalogger and the windows client.

Much of that work can be seen in data_types.h (Under the GPL). Jeff wrote JAWS. When Jeff Grafton graduated in 2004 JAWS was a linux client/server for AWS. It logged to a plain text (CSV) log file and sent data to Weather Underground. It also provided up to the second formatted text output via port 8888. It ran in a screen on weather, a vectra in the TJHSST machine room.

Jeff Grafton had graduated and I, Lee Burton, came into the picture around this point to take over Jeff's neat project. The first thing I did was write a script to parse the text log file and populate a mysql database. I then modified the JAWS server to also log to mysql. Then to get current weather I added another listen port on port 8889 for raw data. Then with the help of Dan Tran, Jeff Grafton, and Aman Gupta the rest of this site was put together. Just recently I registered a sourceforge project for JAWS. I will soon upload JAWS to sourceforge. Current source can be found here for the time being.