Build yourself a weather station
91–100 of 127 posts
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#92I 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…
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#93I 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…
Accuweather? Lol please give me that 45 day daily forecast! All apps use the same fucking forecasts that our government puts out. The problem i think is with people's expectations. They dont understand weather and think it's easy to predict like some other things. They dont understand that it is a dynamic, chaotic, non linear system where repeating the same process 1000x will always yield slightly diff results
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#94Once you get a 1-wire master, you can chain devices on a single cable (e.g. the ubiquitous DS18B20 temperature sensor). Digikey, Adafruit and Sparkfun have plenty of breakout boards and it's pretty easy to find code either bare metal (bit banging) or linux I2C
There's a pretty good intro book by Tim Bitson: https://www.biblio.com/weather-toys-by-bitson-tim/work/56888...
And some interesting projects such as this 1-wire rain gauge: http://www.midondesign.com/Documents/1wire_raingauge.PDF
https://www.element14.com/community/groups/internet-of-thing...
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I'll have to see if the newer-model Ambient here can be pointed to PWS.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#96This 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 che…
If your goal is to play and learn about stuff, whatever you're doing is fine.
If your goal is to get basic weather information, buy a used weather station with usb access, plug it up to whatever hobby computer you already have (I have a pi, so I'd use that). Then write a cron to read from the station and write it out to some publicly-available spreadsheet or database. There are a bunch: Google, Airtable, and so on. Most all of these can be written by one POST.
Then you can figure out how you'd like to see the data. Add in a station ID for more fun and a distributed system. I'm seeing Ebay new weather stations as low as 24 bucks or so. That'd be the only cost I know of, and I think with some searching for used gear you could get it under $10.
There's a _huge_ difference between focusing on the problem and focusing on the tech. If you're preparing yourself for a world of corporate coding? Please keep learning about message queues and so forth! You'll need those skills. If, however, you just want to know the weather in various places with your own setup? Do that. Just don't do one of those things while pretending you're doing both. Each project has vastly-different parameters.
To drive this home, if I've decided I want a coder to come to my office and make a cool little way of telling the weather outside? I want the project that just does that. Code for an hour or two, then leave. If you come and start deploying a kubernetes cloud-based auto-scaling megasytem, you're coding for yourself instead of my problem. My only point was that since there is such a huge gap, when you teach people you should be clear about the hidden lessons of what you're teaching.
* Now traditionally programmers throw out a lot of "what if"s here. What if we needed split-second reports? What if we're dealing with an offline situation or a saturated net? All of those are great considerations. Also, all of those were not included in the spec I read back to you. Don't go inventing what-ifs where none existed. It's a good way to build unmaintable monsters. Hopefully you got the point. It was a minor point and not directed at you, just a comment on cool-tech articles in general. (Also, I'd love to demo actually building it, but it would probably be quite less dramatic and interesting than your version, for the reasons I explain above)
Keep up the good writing! Looking forward to reading you again.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#97I use a few of them with a NUC server and some custom nodejs scripts.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#98Re: Build yourself a weather station
#99This doesn't actually predict weather, though, correct? It just sits on your roof and tells you whether it's raining? So... the same could be achieved by sticking your hand out of the window?
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
To answer your question, if you want to obtain raw sensor data our government (and some volunteers) maintains a network of thousands of weather stations. Many are automated, many are people doing manual obs. If you know how to write code you can programmatically obtain these data.
However you might be confused... climacell does forecasts and you asked about finding station data? They are completely different things. I have no insight into what climacell does but i am a knowledge person in industry. I can tell you that nobody has some groudnbreaking 'AI' machine learning algorithm that is amazingly great at forecasting weather. If such a thing did exist, that person would have zillions of dollars because they can accurately predict weather better then anyone else.