In this paper, we present a new construction of a finite automaton associated with a rational (or regular) expression. It is very similar to the one of the so-called Thompson automaton, but it overcomes the failure of the extension of that construction to the case of weighted rational expressions. At the same time, it preserves all (or almost all) of the properties of the Thompson automaton. This construction has two supplementary outcomes. The first one is the reinterpretation in terms of automata of a data structure introduced by Champarnaud, Laugerotte, Ouardi, and Ziadi for the efficient computation of the position (or Glushkov) automaton of a rational expression, and which consists in a duplicated syntactic tree of the expression decorated with some additional links. The second one supposes that this construction devised for the case of weighted expressions is brought back to the domain of Boolean expressions. It allows then to describe, in terms of automata, the construction of the Star Normal Form of an expression that was defined by Brüggemann-Klein, and also with the purpose of an efficient computation of the position automaton.