Prowlar 4th Nov 2017

We have a new piece of software in development called Prowlar (‘Prodata reports of Weatherlink archive records’).

Sample monthly report from Prowlar
Sample monthly report from Prowlar

It’s not ready for official release yet, but development has reached a point where we’re happy to talk about it.

Prowlar is a web-based reporting tool for data uploaded to the Davis weatherlink.com platform (so if you’re not using weatherlink.com then, sorry, but this isn’t relevant to you). Those who are uploading data to weatherlink.com will be using one of three methods:

  1. A WeatherlinkIP logger;
  2. Using a Weatherlink v6 subscription;
  3. Running a Connect remote gateway;

If you’re using any of these routes then Prowlar may be of interest. We may well be adding additional sources of weatherlink.com data in the future as new sources become available.

In a nutshell, Prowlar is intended to provide much more flexible reporting and presentation of periodic (days/month/annual) summary data than is possible with the standard weatherlink.com platform or with the Weatherlink for Windows software. The image above shows one example of a typical monthly report – click to download the original PDF report.

Key features

Key features are as follows:

  • Fully cloud-based and accessible everywhere via any standard web browser;
  • Maintains a complete database of your weatherlink.com data from induction into Prowlar and provides fully automatic updating;
  • Allows you to design your own fully-customisable NOAA-style monthly & annual reports, including those specific parameters you select (chosen from across all VP2 sensors, including those on supplementary transmitters), in your preferred order and with appropriate summary fields;
  • Allows download in PDF and CSV format (click image above for a sample PDF download);
  • Allows multiple weatherlink.com stations to be accessed from a single account;
  • Charting module in development;
  • Alerts for sensors that may have gone offline is in development;
  • Several additional features are under consideration;

Roadmap

The next milestone will be the introduction of a charting module which will hopefully be available by early 2018. This will complete the three main feature categories (text reports, charts and alerts) that Prowlar will offer but there is a long list of detailed enhancements to each of these categories planned for implementation thereafter – more details once the charting milestone has been reached.

One of the design aims for Prowlar is that it should be readily adaptable to novel summary requirements to suit individual users. Obviously there’s a balance to be struck between the effort required to implement new features, their likely broader appeal and how quickly requests can be turned round. It may be that certain unusual features would need to be introduced on a commissioned basis. But the overall principle is that Prowlar is intended to be as flexible as is realistically possible to meet diverse reporting needs.

Trialling Prowlar

While Prowlar is clearly very much still in development with major features yet to be added and is not yet commercially available, the software is stable enough that we can offer access to a demo account. And for anyone with a particular interest then we may be able to give you access to the beta-test platform to work with your own data.

So if Prowlar sounds like it might be of interest to you then feel free to get in touch and we can provide further details.

Further updates

This blog page will be updated in due course when there is further progress with Prowlar development to report.