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Build yourself a weather station

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Re: Build yourself a weather station

#121

Post by izacus »

cloudkj wrote: post #115
izacus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I solved this was by buying cheap weather stations from AliExpress. Many of them come with multiple temperature/humidity sensors powered by batteries - for as low as 70$ for a station with 4 sensors. Those sensors transmit on 433 MH or 838MHz radio which has excellent range (20m+ through walls) and long (months+) battery life. On RPi side I only had to get an RTL-SDR receiver and run https://github.com/merban…

Just saw some of the references to RTL-SDR in the thread comments and started down the rabbit hole, and it looks like a fascinating area for hobbyists. Can you provide some links to temperature sensors you've tried that work well with an RTL-SDR receiver? I'm also interested in setting something up with a Raspberry Pi.

The link to my original station which I used with SDR is sadly dead now, but I got one of these for 70$ now:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32810015137.html

(Hopefully the link still works.)

The sensors are kinda bulky, but still more reliable than anything I managed to build by myself :)

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#122

Post by arm85 »

idatum wrote: post #109
arm85 wrote: post #25

I'm using weewx for my weather station. I pulled the weather station out of a bin at my former place of employment, which is an airmar 200wx, ultrasonic wind sensor that's typically used on boats. The humidity sensor doesn't work, so I wrote a python script, that acts as man in the middle, that reads in the data, and when it gets to the humidity values, it replaces them with numbers from a DHT22 humidity sensor inste…

Living in the PNW with many consecutive months of damp and cool weather, I've found most humidity sensors to be unreliable. Often their operating range is between 20% and 80%, which misses the very dry summers and very wet winters here. After a few weeks, I start getting bad readings, and finally failures. Lately, I've had better results using a small 5VDC fan within the weather station enclosure, with the hope that…

Yes, they do fail. I guess that's evident by the design of the weather station, as the humidity sensor is modular, so it can be replaced.

Unfortunately, I think this design also means it has a low ingress protection value. The unit I ended up with had the humidity sensor replaced and it still wasn't providing numbers. I think it may have spent a year or so out at sea on a buoy.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#123

Post by jrockway »

RNCTX wrote: post #116
jrockway wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the FAA sites aren't as useful as they could be for weather forecasting. Apparently many sites are too close to the ground, so the temperature data and dewpoint data is unusable for mesoscale analysis. Sometimes the dewpoint is above the air temperature, for example, which is impossible. It doesn't really matter for air traffic, but it does matter for forecasting storms. If you are interested…

Don't know where this criticism comes from but temp and dewpoint data absolutely matter for air traffic, because it determines cloud bases. If cloud bases are below the decision height for the instrument approaches into an airport, it's illegal for a commercial operator to depart from there (because they could not reliably return to the field in case of emergency after takeoff). The standard data output of an FAA wea…

They measure cloud bases directly, with a laser-based sensor.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#124

Post by arm85 »

jeffkeen wrote: post #118
arm85 wrote: post #25

I'm using weewx for my weather station. I pulled the weather station out of a bin at my former place of employment, which is an airmar 200wx, ultrasonic wind sensor that's typically used on boats. The humidity sensor doesn't work, so I wrote a python script, that acts as man in the middle, that reads in the data, and when it gets to the humidity values, it replaces them with numbers from a DHT22 humidity sensor inste…

Thanks for the tip on weewx! Hadn't heard of it, and got my Davis Vantage 2 Pro I just inherited working and posting to weather underground with a raspberry pi + weewx. Real easy

Yeah, it's useful if you want a static website for your weatherstation. But I would quite like the current readings, to actually be current, rather than up to 5 mins old.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#125

Post by harperlee »

ralphhughes wrote: post #60
harperlee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this is too off-topic but I was just looking into home automation and perhaps someone might have good advice: I have an old (~25-30 years) radiant ceiling heating system with 15 thermostats that are starting to malfunction and I need to replace. I don't want to break the bank just doing this, but I'd love to have the ability to read temperature and command on/off on each of one. I'm going through ESPHome righ…

If you need to control mains AC loads, I highly recommend something like the Sonoff Wifi switches. They're similar to the wifi "Smart plugs" you can get these days but are aimed at fixed wiring installations and they're safety tested. You can also get versions with built in temp\humidity sensors in the switch, then re-flash the Sonoff firmware with esphome and control all 15 from a single raspberry pi running home as…

Thanks a lot for taking the time to comment :)

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#126

Post by raphinou »

cryptoz wrote: post #21
raphinou wrote: post #15

Is 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.

The Galaxy S4 had a hygrometer, 'ambient' thermometer, and barometer. Most phones have dropped the thermometer (too sensitive to temp fluctuations to make much sense, surface temps not that useful for weather prediction in urban areas, etc) and the hygrometer (waterproofing), but most have kept the barometer. It's my long passion to 'activate' all the billions of barometers and use them in weather forecasting. There…

There's https://pressurenet.io/ using smartphones barometers

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#127

Post by cryptoz »

raphinou wrote: post #126
cryptoz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Galaxy S4 had a hygrometer, 'ambient' thermometer, and barometer. Most phones have dropped the thermometer (too sensitive to temp fluctuations to make much sense, surface temps not that useful for weather prediction in urban areas, etc) and the hygrometer (waterproofing), but most have kept the barometer. It's my long passion to 'activate' all the billions of barometers and use them in weather forecasting. There…

There's https://pressurenet.io/ using smartphones barometers

That's my dead project and someone's copyright violated me by stealing my content and rehosting it with bad edits!

Thanks for pointing that out, that is definitely not the site we put up for that project (~2011-2015)

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