Build yourself a weather station • Hacker News Board

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#41

Post by GeoffKnauth » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 10:13 AM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #34

GeoffKnauth wrote: post #31

I like that Kirill Dubovikov built a weather station and showed others how. The more people who do this, the better, not just for education and skills, but in terms of gathering weather information that can help forecasters. He wrote, "the Weather app on my iPhone is not very good at making accurate forecasts," and I thought, "he must have been using the wrong app." I hope in addition to building weather stations and…

I had been very disappointed with the local weather forecast last summer, and then there was an interview with one of the meteorologists involved and they said they were quite proud of how accurate their predictions had been so far. I was taken aback, as in my mind their "success rate" had been well below 50%. Then I got my answer: they focused on the temperature forecast, while since I bike to work what I was intere…

I think you will like the new app coming out next month better, especially with your use case.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#42

Post by GeoffKnauth » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 10:16 AM UTC

0-O-0 wrote: post #38

GeoffKnauth wrote: post #31

I like that Kirill Dubovikov built a weather station and showed others how. The more people who do this, the better, not just for education and skills, but in terms of gathering weather information that can help forecasters. He wrote, "the Weather app on my iPhone is not very good at making accurate forecasts," and I thought, "he must have been using the wrong app." I hope in addition to building weather stations and…

Gave it a quick test and I think you should invest a bit more into UX. Default screen shows me only current weather and that just isn't useful. Compare it to default Weather app. Or was I supposed to configure this screen? Navigation inside the app doesn't feel intuitive at all. Maybe it's more similar to default experience on android? No idea. Map/Hourly/Daily buttons don't work as tabs. Daily view arrives with scro…

Thanks. I think the new app coming out next month has a better UX. As for comparison with the default Weather app, I think the underlying forecast is more accurate. [Note, I work not on the app, but in back-end data. I'm happy to forward feedback to the people who work on the app.]

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#43

Post by GeoffKnauth » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 10:37 AM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #34

GeoffKnauth wrote: post #31

I like that Kirill Dubovikov built a weather station and showed others how. The more people who do this, the better, not just for education and skills, but in terms of gathering weather information that can help forecasters. He wrote, "the Weather app on my iPhone is not very good at making accurate forecasts," and I thought, "he must have been using the wrong app." I hope in addition to building weather stations and…

I had been very disappointed with the local weather forecast last summer, and then there was an interview with one of the meteorologists involved and they said they were quite proud of how accurate their predictions had been so far. I was taken aback, as in my mind their "success rate" had been well below 50%. Then I got my answer: they focused on the temperature forecast, while since I bike to work what I was intere…

From talking with meteorologists, it seems forecasting actual rain is not very hard if you have enough current data on the state of the atmosphere. What can be difficult is mistiness that is just on the borderline between falling droplets and moisture just hanging in the air. Differences can be extremely local in nature. [I'm not a meteorologist, I program computers, but I'm a pilot so I have a pilot's appreciation of and contact with weather.]

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#44

Post by modinfo » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 10:37 AM UTC

Kudos for using MQTT When I come home, my phone connnect to the router and opens the gate and my rpi zero tells me, "Welcome home." It's been working for a year now every day :D is a simple python script with openwrt script on router.

I wrote it on my blog http://sebastian.korotkiewicz.eu/techlog/homeautomation-dete...

it very simple to do!

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#45

Post by coronadisaster » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 10:45 AM UTC

modinfo wrote: post #44

Kudos for using MQTT When I come home, my phone connnect to the router and opens the gate and my rpi zero tells me, "Welcome home." It's been working for a year now every day :D is a simple python script with openwrt script on router. I wrote it on my blog http://sebastian.korotkiewicz.eu/techlog/homeautomation-dete... it very simple to do!

Nice but that link appears to be broken: https://gitlab.itunix.eu/skorotkiewicz/owrtwifi2mqtt/blob/ma... ... But yes the script can also be found at the bottom.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#46

Post by ls65536 » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 10:46 AM UTC

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's also the Citizen Weather Observer Program [1]. It's more North America-centric (where the data even gets ingested for use by some weather forecast models, after various data quality checks), but anyone from anywhere in the world is also free to share their weather data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Weather_Observer_Progr...

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#47

Post by ssfivy » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

I'm more curious on how the nice I2c timing diagrams are generated. It doesn't look like the result from wavedrom[1] so I'm wondering if there are more tools like this out there.

Incidentally, I tried doing searches to see if those images are just copied from somewhere else, and ended up on what looks like a news site with what looks like content of the article after multiple passes through google translate [2]. Anyone has an idea why would something like this exist? Somebody playing with AI/ML perhaps?

[1] https://wavedrom.com/

[2] https://newshimalaya.com/2020/06/15/earn-your-self-a-weather...

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#48

Post by DanielBMarkham » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 10:52 AM UTC

This is a really cool project that I would perhaps like to try myself one day! A home weather station has been on my list for several years.

Now I will say something negative. It's a nit, but I think it needs to be said.

I've seen a lot of these "In which I write a (perhaps series of) essays on building X using all kinds of cool tech you'd probably like to play with when you could get the same result with less than ten bucks, maybe an hour or two, and just a handful of code, if any"

I'm okay with and completely love "Let's do something cool and learn!" I'm not okay with "I have this problem, so let me by implication teach you how you should architect problems when you run across them" We need to clearly differentiate. You should not, and you should never, start with an important project and begin speculating on what cool tech you could play with.

Playing and learning are great. Yay! Adding structure and complexity where none is needed is an antipattern if you're doing anything of value for yourself or somebody else. This stack might end up being necessary. Absolutely. Make the problem "prove" that it's necessary. You should have a clear and unambiguous process for choosing a stack; do it by necessity. Never even accidentally teach that you do it by "hey, that's cool!" People end up doing that, and somebody ends up having to clean it up.

tl;dr Love fun projects like this. Keep 'em coming. Just please be sure you're clear to the reader that they're learning/fun projects.

* Perfectly fine to add a tech or two to a new project in order to learn-as-you-work, it should just be done with the upmost care and a close eye to how much team bandwidth it's using versus the value being provided and how you'd back it out if you had to.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#49

Post by Anthony-G » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

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 UK Met Office runs WOW (Weather Observations Website) which allows users from all over the world to submit their own observations: https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#50

Post by voqv » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 11:44 AM UTC

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.

All Netatmo owners can put their local weather station on an open service. You can find it by searching for Netatmo Weathermap and the data is very dense in populated zones. I was able to fairly accurately pinpoint the location of where rain is/was in the town. I'm surprised Netatmo hasn't leveraged this data better.