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Build yourself a weather station

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Re: Build yourself a weather station

#21

Post by cryptoz »

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 shouldn't really be much need to manufacture so many weather stations when so much can be done using already deployed hardware (smartphones).

I know IBM is doing assimilation of barometer data into their new models from Weather Underground app installs, and I suspect Apple may finally glance at using their iPhone barometers for weather forecasting now that they bought Dark Sky, but I also don't trust either group to make the results and research public and for the greater societal good - I expect Apple and IBM will mostly use their barometer tech for their own internal, private weather forecast systems.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#23

Post by KaiserPro »

One thing that really improves your experience is storing your data in something that grafana can read. I like graphite, but your mileage may vary.

There are lots of DBs that you can use, including postgres. the flexibility and configurability that you get is outstanding. With the alerts subsystem you can easily attach triggers for bots.

Also having really simple and configurable graphs that look good.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#25

Post by arm85 »

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 instead.

Edit: http://www.weewx.com/

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#27

Post by ubergesundheit »

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.

There is openSenseMap [1] for example which collects data from many of these Arduino/ESP based devices.

[1]: https://opensensemap.org

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#28

Post by pingec »

I got into weather stations just recently. If you don't want to go that far in the DIY way for the hardware I recommend getting [1] + [2] or if you are from EU like me [3].

You can see some of the data here [4]

You can hook this thing up to the internet over wifi and it will send data to https://www.ecowitt.net https://www.wunderground.com https://weathercloud.net/ and/or post it to your custom endpoint. The gateway can also be queried for data over an API. This thing is quite new on the market but I am very happy with it. You can hook it up to already supported websites or you can use a raspberry pi to collect data yourself (WeeWx and Cumulus MX already support the API).

[1] http://www.ecowitt.com/weather_station/5.html

[2] http://www.ecowitt.com/wifi_weather/80.html

[3] https://www.froggit.de/product_info.php?language=en&info=p44...

[4] https://app.weathercloud.net/d7287072295#current

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#29

Post by mythor »

pingec wrote: post #28

I got into weather stations just recently. If you don't want to go that far in the DIY way for the hardware I recommend getting [1] + [2] or if you are from EU like me [3]. You can see some of the data here [4] You can hook this thing up to the internet over wifi and it will send data to https://www.ecowitt.net https://www.wunderground.com https://weathercloud.net/ and/or post it to your custom endpoint. The gateway…

Good tips, I would like to add that if you already have a weather station you can buy a $10 RTL-SDR like [1] and plug it in to a PI, then use ready made software [2] to extract the weather information. You can hook this data up to any API you would like.

[1] https://www.banggood.com/USB2_0-FM-DAB-DVB-T-RTL2832U-R820T2... [2] https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#30

Post by Wubdidu »

I'm by no means an expert on this, but I had some issues with the temperature reading of the BME280. It seems to be so sensitive that simply having it on top of a Wemos D1 Mini shield PCB cause the temperatures to differ by more than 2 degrees celsius because the heat of the ESP module seems to radiate up to the BME280 (or transfers through the wires/traces). Just having my finger right above it ticked off the temperature reading, so I assumed even indirect sunlight on it or similar things might give wrong readings too.

I resorted to adding a DS18B20 for temperature readings and only using the air pressure and humidity of the BME280. I could design a PCB that moves the BME280 further away from the D1 Mini with tiny traces to avoid heat transfer, but then again I didn't want to risk it and a quick research showed that the DS18B20 seems to be reasonably accurate as well.

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