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Build yourself a weather station

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Re: Build yourself a weather station

#81

Post by brootstrap »

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…

Hi geoff - seems like you are pretty knowledgeable here. I have to disagree with "seems forecasting actual rain is not very hard if you have enough current data on the state of the atmosphere" ... Who told you that? accuweather meteologists?

Rain is not easy predict, especially long in advance. Just taking things with a grain of salt here. If you truly believe that forecasting actual rain is not very hard, please start a new weather forecasting company and give it all you got! However i'll tell you, it's not that easy. Just because a computer model 'runs' does not mean it correctly modeled the atmosphere. All models are imperfect bud and those imperfections get amplified by 10x when trying to simulate earth+atmosphere systems

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#82

Post by brootstrap »

cryptoz wrote: post #19
maxioatic wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Howdy, seen you posting before. I would be warey of any crowd sourced data. So now we have average american Joe running a weather station that feeds directly into our state of the art GFS model? What if joe forgets to maintain his station? How do you assert quality control?

I just am skeptical about this all. cant trust users phones to provide input for mission critical weather forecast models (GFS). Peoples lives depend on this information!

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#83

Post by brootstrap »

cryptoz wrote: post #20
fyfy18 wrote: post #10

Does 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-pro…

good advice. Although running WRF locally, what are you a madman?

I would suggest looking into simple predictions. One of the first ones you learn in school is just basically just repeat what happened today. So if today was sunny, tomorrow sunny. Stupid, simple but decently effective. Except during transition periods between air-masses (when weather is changing).

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#84

Post by sansnomme »

brootstrap wrote: post #77
sansnomme wrote: post #73

HN ML practitioners would probably find the Climacell method of weather forecasting to be relevant. https://www.climacell.co/

Why is it relevant? Do you know what they use for forecasts? I work in industry and have built weather applications for 5+ years now. Let me tell you, everyone uses the same source data. Machine learning is not going to help predict weather. If it was that simple, someone would have machine learned the weather already and they would be making zillions of dollars with their accurate AI weather predictions. Do you post…

So are you saying that they are only good at sales? Out of curiosity where do you normally obtain the raw sensor data?

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#85

Post by sxcurry »

creeble wrote: post #79
notkaiho wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weather Underground is one: https://www.wunderground.com/pws/overview

Weatherunderground hater here. There are a large number of stations (Ambient Weather is a big seller in the US) that hook up neatly and conveniently to only supply data to wunderground. But then you are 100% reliant upon them for their graphs and app displays, which are slow and often broken, and give you little choice in formatting. For example, the app doesn't display a wind history at all, but the web does. But it…

Agreed - WU has really gone downhill. I pulled my station (KORTALEN1) off WU and moved it to PWS- pwsweather.com

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#86

Post by izacus »

vikeri wrote: post #3

I already have a setup with a Raspberry PI so I’m only looking for a temperature sensor that: - Is rain proof - Transmits over BLE or WiFi - Can be battery powered

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/merbanan/rtl_433 on the RPi itself to decode the data.

It was significantly cheaper than going with BLE or WiFi sensors.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#87

Post by acidburnNSA »

addflip wrote: post #80
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-...

This is awesome. Thanks for posting this. Question for you do you happen to have a soldering iron you recommend for the build out?

I should technically solder more of this, as it's mostly together with prototype cables at the moment. Any soldering iron should work, but I am partial to Weller Soldering Stations. I have one from ~10 years ago that has an analog adjustment, though now I see they look to be mostly digital. Their website has them around $300 for some reason but they are on amazon for closer to $100 (which is what I got mine for).

https://www.weller-tools.com/we1010na/

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#88

Post by acidburnNSA »

_n_b_ wrote: post #58
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.

Absolutely. That's part of why I'm delaying. A professor at the University of Michigan is working on a similar project and I want to catch up with her. They're using a cheap(ish) proportional counter to be able to identify all of the isotopes that you might be looking for in a variety of wartime or accident scenarios.

https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Abstract/2018/11000/...

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#89

Post by MegaDeKay »

timbit42 wrote: post #74
MegaDeKay wrote: post #72

If you have a Davis VP2 Weather station, I wrote a blog post a while back reverse-engineering the protocol, and showed how to sniff its wireless transmissions and receive it on something like an IM-ME Pretty Pink Pager. The Davis Outdoor stuff is very good quality for the price and has given me good service for many years. http://madscientistlabs.blogspot.com/2012/03/first-you-get-s...

The video doesn't work.

It was a video clip from a Simpson's episode and not core to the technology or process discussed in the post ;-)

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#90

Post by kernelmode »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #48

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 t…

Hi Daniel. Thanks a lot for the comment. This makes sense. We all should choose right tools for the right job and architect our solutions according to the requirements and restrictions we have.

One of my original goals was to make the financial entry-barrier as low as possible. Another — to provide educational context for covering a full-stack IoT development from firmware to backend to frontend. This means using cheap hardware and open-source software. In fact, I spent around 9$ on everything that was needed for this project.

I wouldn't say that this project is over-engineered with cool tech. I tried to keep the setup as minimal as possible, sticking to industry-standard data exchange protocols and frameworks.

Of course, all of the software part could be written using ANSI C or C++, but from my point of view, it wouldn't make the project simpler, because there are more specialized tools that are better suited for the particular task, be it backend, frontend or firmware (Rust, HTML5+JS and C in case of this project). I have outlined rationalization behind this particular technology stack under the "Choosing the technology stack" heading.

You are right that in a commercial setting, there might be myriad more inputs that constrain the technology choice like team experience, your company's recommended technology stack and etc. Of course, we can't take into consideration all these hypothetical requirements, as they depend on the environment you are working in and the commercial goals of the project.

To make your comment complete, could you share your ideas on how to architect this alternatively to get the same result with less than ten bucks, maybe an hour or two, and just a handful of code, if any? If it is a viable alternative I'll consider adding it into the post as an alternative tech stack, so people reading it will see more alternative options on how to build this project.

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