I'm a big fan of Openhab along with the Homie 3 mqtt convention. There is nice homie library for the esp8266/32 that makes it very simple to create custom sensors/actuators, that support things like simple wifi based config and OTA firmware updates: https://github.com/homieiot/homie-esp8266
Build yourself a weather station
11–20 of 127 posts
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#12Shame there is no github repo...
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#13A word of advice: double-check you're actually getting a BME280. I accidentally bought a BMP280 which lacks the humidity sensor. -_- So yeah, I have something similar myself, with a React frontend on the official Raspberry Pi display, a BME680 (never got the IAQ stuff to work though) and InfluxDB + Grafana. No remote/outdoor modules yes, because I'm undecided about the technology.
Also, doublecheck the readings from this sensor. There has been plenty of report about the temperature reading being much higher than the actual temperature (in my case, I got 4C higher than ambient). Some people says it has self-heating problem since if you put active airflow the temperature dropped.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#14I'm currently working on something similar for the a new house I'm building, but for the inside.
I plan to have multiple ESP32 nodes with sensors (luminosity, temperature, pressure, moisture, presence detector), ble scanning (in order to detect who is in the room), and microphones for voice control (picovice porcupine library for stop word detection, then google speech 2 text). For the microphones, I'm still waiting for my mems microphnes to directly include them on the sensor node, or I will use an additional board like the esp32-korvo which works very good (already tested). For audio playback in the rooms, I'm planning on using the up2stream amp devices with ceiling speakers. As for powering it, I'm still unsure on what to use. I first ordered some olimex POE esp32 isolated (so you can power them from both POE and USB at the same time). However the ethernet interface will go up/down in an endless loop after a few minutes of sending data over mqtt. Strangely, the non ISO version works though as it seems, I haven't run it though in a box (higher temperature). So I'm still unsure if I use POE or a 220V->5V converter in each case, or feed them directly with 5V from a central place (which would require more cable length planning)
I did some programming at first, but then quickly switched top https://esphome.io/ which allows you to include your sensors without writing any code. It has support for all kinds of sensors, integrated API, mqtt, webserver, etc... and you only have to configure one yaml file which will then automatically generate the C code and compile/upload your firmware. No need to reinvent the wheel!
It's also easy to include your own components in case you want to do anything custom. The only disadvantage is that it's still based on esp32 idf 3 (in case you are adding components, I would prefer to do it for the new version and not the old one), but the v4 was only released a few weeks ago.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#15Is there a network of people installing such weather stations and sharing their info? I thought a crowd-source weather information like that could be very useful.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#16Is there a network of people installing such weather stations and sharing their info? I thought a crowd-source weather information like that could be very useful.
Weather Underground is one: https://www.wunderground.com/pws/overview
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#17For those that do not feel brave enough to build a weather station from scratch you can buy a 'Watson W-8681' Weather Station and hook up a Raspberry Pi to it to collect all the data.
Jim Easterbrook (ex-BBC engineer) has a really good write up on the process, and also shares his python code:
http://www.jim-easterbrook.me.uk/weather/
I don't know Jim, but I have done the same following his instructions.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#18A bit unrelated to this.
For showing the weather forecast I have this by my door. https://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook-reader/
A quick glance in the morning and I know if I should bring an umbrella or not.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#19I love this! Am super interested in building something like this. IMO there is even more value if this is built with a central server in mind for each weather station constructed. A network of stations working together can begin to create their own hyperlocal weather network and could even be useful in small-scale, short-term predictions. There are some startups that do a bigger version of this and for a long time I'…
This sounds pretty neat. How many stations/ how big of area would be needed to make some predictions?
Well, I think the most important metric you can measure on the surface is atmospheric pressure. Simple temperature and humidity is generally insufficient to make good predictions - but pressure at the surface, measured across a geography, can tell you about conditions in the upper atmosphere.
I use barometers in phones for this kind of purpose. I think that a minimum of 1 quality reading per 4 sq km would represent sufficiently dense coverage to create an improvement in forecasts. But more is better, since quality can be iffy.
Some papers published by Cliff Mass et al from UW might have more info on density work. I'll try to find a link. [1] [2]
The work I do is presently just in the US on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe... with future expansion planned to allow better data acquisition. Open source code I wrote for Android for this purpose (periodically measuring pressure) https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary
[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/waf/article/33/5/1375/40806/Imp...
[2] https://journals.ametsoc.org/jtech/article/35/3/523/107377/S...
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#20Does anyone know of any projects that allow you to do weather forecasting yourself at home? Of course it's going to be limited without a network of stations, but with measuring atmospheric pressure (and delta) should give you a pretty good indication of the local weather for the next few hours. Maybe you could tie into a receiver for satelite images.
This probably isn't quite what you mean, but WRF (Weather Research and Forecast) model is an open source and actively developed weather forecast model you can run at home or on the cloud: https://www.mmm.ucar.edu/weather-research-and-forecasting-mo...
If you collect your own weather data at scale, you can write assimilation routines to get WRF to incorporate your data into the model runs along with NOAA/MADIS/etc-provided data.
I know that's more complicated than you are suggesting but it's worth mentioning.
There are a lot of simple ways to do home weather forecasting. You can write your own Dark Sky clone by downloading/scraping/APIing your local radar station and then write your own wind predictor a few hours into the future based on rain movement or simple statistics from recent local wind data.