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Build yourself a weather station

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Re: Build yourself a weather station

#51

Post by ako »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #6

A 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.

Built a similar thing: raspberry pi + bme680. Code is python + kivy. Allows me to run the frontend with X.org.

Screenshot: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBc5uWLDOgc/?utm_source=ig_web_c...

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#52

Post by harperlee »

bluelu wrote: post #14

I'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…

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 right now, but in any case, any recommendations on very low-key but reliable thermostats that are amenable to hacking with them would be super welcome!

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#53

Post by namero999 »

ssfivy wrote: post #13
fuzzy2 wrote: post #6

A 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.

Yes, the BME280 is very good at sensing temperature deltas, much less at sensing absolute temperature. A correction factor is most often needed with this device.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#54

Post by roter »

GeoffKnauth wrote: post #43
magicalhippo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Or even the proportion and impact of ice v. water droplets. The modelling of this in a warming world is making the latest global climate models used in the upcoming IPCC AR6 show a higher equilibrium climate sensitivity than the previous edition [0].

[0] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/06/sensit...

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#55

Post by namero999 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #23

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.

InfluxDB and Grafana can run decently on a raspi zero-w, and it's my setup of choice for my self-watering/weather rig.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#56

Post by mikece »

Very neat -- but I would love to see one of these that doesn't rely on WiFi or Bluetooth, using instead something like a Baofeng UV-5R and sending weather info updates by APRS (amateur radio license required), allowing for really remote observation stations.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#57

Post by roter »

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…

One issue with hobbyist weather stations is that they aren't particularly useful for use for assimilating into numerical weather models. The pressure is useful as it is relatively hard to get that wrong unless mislabelling sea-level pressure as station pressure.

Other variables can be significantly in error due to the siting of the station: under a tree, not aspirated, in the wake of a building, on a rooftop, etc.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#58

Post by _n_b_ »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #9

Nice. I love weather station builds. Here is mine. I added a pm air quality sensor, a infrared rain sensor, some light sensors, a CO2 sensor, an accelerometer, and a loudness sensor. There's a spot for my Geiger counter too but that installation is not done yet. https://partofthething.com/thoughts/weather-and-air-quality-...

Have you thought about adding some kind of room-temperature spectroscopy along with your Geiger counter? Might be interesting to correlate with spikes in the count rate.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#60

Post by ralphhughes »

harperlee wrote: post #52
bluelu wrote: post #14

I'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…

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 assistant. This would allow you to set temperatures for individual rooms over the internet.
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