Today I went back to work on the hardware, and was able to also sneak in some work on the software.  I built the mount for the anemometer, the base for the rain gauge, and waterproofed the temp/humidity and solar gauges.  The waterproofing involved painting the boards with liquid electrical tape.  Not very high tech, and doesn’t look pretty, but it seems to work well.

The anemometer base was very simple to make.  I used some PVC tubing, a 90 degree elbow, a T fitting, and some stainless steel clamps.  I cut off part of the T fitting so that it can be clamped on to the weather station mast.  These pictures show the finished product..

Anemometer Base - Parts

Anemometer Base - Assembled

The rain gauge base is made from a weird assortment of parts and fittings.  The main base is a paint can lid.  The center mount is made up of a shower drain, PVC adapters, and a short piece of PVC tubing.  Then I drilled holes for the water to drain and for the cables to reach the gauge, which will be mounted on top of the base.  The next pictures show how it fits together.

Rain Gauge Base - Bottom

Rain Gauge Base - Top

As far as the software goes, I translated my calculations for the equinoxes and solstices from Java to PHP and incorporated them into the astronomy page.  I did some clean up of the existing pages, header, and footer, and added links to validate the HTML and CSS for each page.  I also started adding some error checking, just so I can get familiar with doing that in PHP.  A lot more to come in that area, as parsing XML files definitely leaves room for errors to occur.