I threw a CD drive motor on a stick with plastic spoons and an ADC. Been logging data every second for a couple years. I think I'm near 20 million rows of unused data now.
Monitoring my weather at home
11–20 of 48 posts
Re: Monitoring my weather at home
#12How useful are wind vanes and anemometers on typical home weather stations? When I was putting together my DIY weather station I got this weather meter kit [1] from Sparkfun that includes a rain gauge, a wind vane, and an anemometer. Later I realized that because of all the tall trees all around my neighborhood (Western Washington) and the less tall trees at my house and the house itself being in the way the wind dir…
My backyard is surrounded by a six foot privacy fence. The back of the yard has a six foot hill and one of the sides is all cypress trees. So much of the wind into my backyard is blocked but I still find the anemometer to be useful as a relative measure. I completely ignore the wind direction but if I see that there's been a 15 mph wind in my backyard, I know the wind in the neighborhood is a good bit higher.
Re: Monitoring my weather at home
#13Do any the of the Davis products come with air pollution sensors?
No you have to also buy an airlink for particulates.
Re: Monitoring my weather at home
#14Feeling sick of seeing Raspberry Pi based project nowadays. Use to love to read about such projects until last year.
Re: Monitoring my weather at home
#15One of the most unexpected and wonderful things about my Ambient Weather station is that within its settings app, you can configure an additional URL for it to send periodic pings to. In my case, I whipped up ambient2mqtt[0] as a way to capture the output of the weather station locally and do what I want with it - in this case, post the data to MQTT and InfluxDB. A few years after that I also purchased a Purple Air P…
I've got something similar set up, except my Ambient station emits to Gopher: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/0/groundhog/ws
Re: Monitoring my weather at home
#16Feeling sick of seeing Raspberry Pi based project nowadays. Use to love to read about such projects until last year.
What changed last year that made you sick of it?
Re: Monitoring my weather at home
#17Feeling sick of seeing Raspberry Pi based project nowadays. Use to love to read about such projects until last year.
What changed last year that made you sick of it?
Not OP, but price and availability. Before about a year or two ago, it was a cheap-and-cheerful way to put some smarts into any project. Now it's impossible to get at twice the price, and the alternatives aren't quite there yet in terms of software support.
I still like reading about the projects you can do with it though. I find it inspiring for my own side things (even though fewer of them involve the RPi itself -- you can push microcontrollers really far these days!)
Re: Monitoring my weather at home
#18Love all the details here! For me, I skipped the crazy expensive Davis hardware and have built a network around the EcoWitt GW1100 station. It collects data at 900mhz from other EcoWitt sensors and sends it over a wifi network to WeeWX. In my case WeeWX is running in a FreeBSD jail, but it could be on any 24-7 powered computer on your network.
WeeWX is one of those hackers projects that I just love. It's not pretty, and a lot of the edges are real rough, but damn, it just works, all day, everyday, and stores data in sqlite with a funky, but beautiful HTML output as well.
Re: Monitoring my weather at home
#19I cycle close to 100 miles per week and a having a good Weather app makes a huge difference for planning my rides. I developed https://apolloweather.com/ after Apple announced it was shutting down Dark Sky.
For me the most important thing is not the accuracy but having easier access to certain metrics to make better decisions. Feels Like and wind are a priority for me. Also UV Index during summer (I live in Florida). I want to know the best days to ride. I also want to know if I should use a thermal base layer or leg warmers. I’m willing to accept some discomfort during the first hour if it will get warmer later. Some rain is acceptable when is warmer. No rain is acceptable when its cold.
Will I have a headwind on the way back? Then I should manage my energy better during the first half.
As long as I see the big picture quickly for the whole week, I’m Ok with accuracy being less than perfect.
Re: Monitoring my weather at home
#20This is cool. I think setting up a weather station will be my next home automation project. Real-time wind / rain data might be useful for some things. Has anyone integrated a weather station with Home Assistant, and do you use the data for anything?