Looking for somewhat 'open' weather station to use with Raspberry based projects

[Ben Luria]

Hiya,

apologies if this topic came up before or in case I am off-topic here. I'm toying with SDR and home automation on a Raspberry Pi and would like to add weather data via WeeWX and a weather station. Is there any particular brand / model I should go for or maybe avoid? Am looking for something solar powered optimally, but that is not a must.

Thanks in advance.

Ben

[Andy_501_ve4per]

Try ACURite 1035 I believe is model number for outdoor sensor unit with wifi connect to display unit; included indoor display unit has USB port to weewx software in PC.

Outdoor unit runs on any high capacity severe service duracell or like dry cells batts. 1 set has run almost 2 yrs for me now. Unit claims to have solar cell that powers a heater unit for measuring snowfall water equivalents.

Good Luck

mine has been OK so far

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[Tom Keffer]

The AcuRite is a possible choice, but it is anything but 'open'.  Everything about it had to be reverse engineered.

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[p q]

I have an AcuRite and it works fine. It's not solar powered. The sensor unit runs off AA batteries that last me more than a year, though it never gets cold here, YMMV.  I don't use SDR. The Acurite display I have has a USB cable that plugs right into the Raspi.

I was unhappy with the temp readings from the 5in1 unit so I ended up building my own solar powered sensor. If I had to do it all again I might build the whole thing myself.

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[vince]

On Sunday, May 17, 2020 at 9:26:50 AM UTC-7, Ben Luria wrote:

apologies if this topic came up before or in case I am off-topic here. I'm toying with SDR and home automation on a Raspberry Pi and would like to add weather data via WeeWX and a weather station. Is there any particular brand / model I should go for or maybe avoid? Am looking for something solar powered optimally, but that is not a must.

What's your budget ?

You can't get more open than WeatherFlow, although (at this time) the rain measurements are not good.  Otherwise pretty slick.  Solar panel, no moving parts, and a great set of programming API 'and' an existing weewx driver that works great.   Excellent customer service.  Very active forums on their site too.  Lots of software integrations from the user community.

(disclaimer - I'm a beta tester for them)

WF just came out with their new Tempest system.  I would expect some folks with the previous SmartWeather gear might be looking to sell gently used stuff for a good price, if you look around.

[Xant]

For really open & dirty, there is PiWeather daughter board, with diverse supporting projects (not endeavoured myself). 

[Greg Troxel]

You put "open" in quotes, which means that I don't know what you mean by
that word :-)

There are a few things you could mean:

1) well-understood interfaces and existing drivers so that you can get
at the weather data and use it, and not have problems due to closed
interfaces

2) open protocol, or perhaps reverse-engineered protocols, for the
sensor suite (outside part) to talk to the console (inside, that you
look at, and that usually is interfaced to a computer), so that you
can sniff it with an SDR instead of using the console receiver.

3) being able to get at the weather data locally, without the device
talking to some cloud service (not under your control, subject to the
company stopping it, and likely run with proprietary software)

3A) separately from transport via cloud, can the local station produce
observations by itself, or does it need a (perhaps implemented with
proprietary software) cloud service to do that?

4) firmware/software for the weather station equipment being open source

5) an open hardware design for the station, even if it uses proprietary
chips

6) full-on open, meaning open licenses for all silicon in the station,
including CPUs and sensors, which leads you to RISC-V and for
temp/humidity I'm really not sure what.


You mentioned home automation, so I would recommend you check out the
mqtt extension, which is I think what most use to bridge weewx data into
an automation system (such as Home Assistant, which is the natural
choice for weewx fans, being open source and python).
https://github.com/weewx/weewx/wiki/mqtt


For 1, there are lots of choices, and basically you should look at what
weewx supports.

For 2, I am not really aware of anything open, except for build-your-own
kinds of stations. But maybe weatherflow is UDP over IP and counts
here. The Davis VP2 protocol has been reverse engineered and there is
rtldavis. However, the Davis datalogger/interface in the console has
the really nice property that when your computer goes down, it keeps
storing data, and then when you straighten out your computer from the
botched upgrade, or you get power back, weewx reads the data and your
historical record is 100% fine, as if you never went down. So I don't
really want to get my data with an SDR on a unix computer, even though
I'd like to try that, because I really like it that I haven't lost data
the probably 6 times I've had an issue in about 2.5 years.

For 3, Davis is fine, and some acurite setups have local USB. Various
other systems have "interceptor" drivers that snoop the data going to
the cloud, and I have the impression that sometimes people fetch their
own data back from the cloud because that's all they can do.

For 3a, note Vince's comments about weatherflow and rain. (I think
weatherflow is really interesting and don't mean to knock them. I just
find the notion that you don't know how much rain you got without the
internet quite curious. On the other hand sometimes with Davis it rains
and you conclude from the readings that you have a bird's nest, wasp's
nest or pine needles in your rain collector or blocking the tipping
bucket from tipping.)

For 4, and even more so for 5, I'm not aware of any contenders, other
than build-your-own with arduino and e.g. i2c sensors. But this is
very interesting and may qualify:
https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Kits/WeatherStation/WeatherStation.html
https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/shop/bricklets/sensors.html
However, I don't see rain and wind.

For 6, my impresssion is that I will be viewed as crazy just for
bringing it up.


That leaves you with all the other considerations, which is that Davis
is expensive but otherwise viewed favorably by most, and that various
cheap stations are cheap and tend to fail. And weatherflow seems to
turn everyone who plays with one into a fan, which is a very positive
comment.


There are surely DIY/maker projects out there to do rain gauges and
maybe wind. Temp is fairly easy, but you need to build a radiation
shield. So I'd say this is for "my hobby is building a weather station
from parts" vs "I want to get weather data into my home assistant setup
and I don't want anything too egregious".

[Tom Keffer]

Just to correct the record, the Vantage protocol was not reverse engineered. They are one of the few vendors who have published their protocol, and have for many years.

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[Colin Larsen]

https://wiki.weatherduino.com/

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[Bill Arthur]

I like the Ecowitt GW-1000 for importing data, it uses the Interceptor driver. The GW-1000 will collect weather data from Ambient Weather, Ecowitt and Fine Offset weather stations.

    While the weather stations will not last as long as a Davis they are very economical and easy to replace. 

[Luc Heijst]

Tom,

The data protocol of their (not so cheap) data-loggers is publiced by Davis, but I know from first hand that the raw data the sensors send to the console is not public. I have put a lot of time in decoding the signals (among others) and still we don’t know the full protocol yet.

Luc

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[Tom Keffer]

True enough.

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[vince]

On Monday, May 18, 2020 at 12:53:16 PM UTC-7, Luc Heijst wrote:

The data protocol of their (not so cheap) data-loggers is publiced by Davis, but I know from first hand that the raw data the sensors send to the console is not public. I have put a lot of time in decoding the signals (among others) and still we don’t know the full protocol yet.

Yet strangely enough the WeatherLinkLive API 'is' published - https://weatherlink.github.io/weatherlink-live-local-api/

[Ben Luria]

Thanks all - reading, digesting! :)