Best Davis station for my buck, and purpose?

[Nick Kavanagh]

I recently moved and made the conscious choice to leave my Accurite 7 in one behind, intending on a major upgrade now that I'm a homeowner and not renter.

Now, I'm overwhelmed by choice. For my purposes, I'm looking for good quality and accuracy, setting my weather website back up, contributing to NOAA, and integrating my homemade temp/humidity/pressure sensors within my house. I'm not trying to provide data for flight/navigation etc., so I'm somewhat in the middle. I want a great system, but not a purely professional system either.

Blah,  blah, blah... what recommendations do you have for best bang for the buck in that kind of use case? My wallet wants to open around 300 dollars, but will have to slam shut again at about 800. I THINK I want Davis, but am quite willing to look at any others some of you might suggest.

TIA,

Nick K.

[michael.k...@gmx.at]

Davis and $300, doesn't sound this fits together.

In my opinion, currently the Ecowitt universe provides the most flexible, most adaptable and most extendable hardware on the market. You can start tiny and go big, they even provide a whole range of different sensors, allowing you to adapt you system to you special needs. Currently, and hopefully they don't go the evil way like others, you also have the possibility to locally access and collect all your data, even without being forced to have your devices online.

You can "build your own" station with Ecowitt components. Start, for instance, with outTemp/humi, barometer, wind, rain, radiation sensors and a console for ~$300. Expand your system with a lightning sensor a month later, buy soil moisture and leaf wetness sensor for Easter, let Santa bring half a dozen extra humi/temp and air quality sensors next Christmas. If a sensor breaks? Get a spare, everything is sold separately. 

They are not perfect, but usually you find a way to get around the limitations.

Their hardware is also sold differently branded by some resellers.

[Tom Hogland]

The Davis Vantage Pro2 would do what you want, other than using your homemade sensors. The console has built-in sensors, though. I've bought two of them used - first a cabled one, then a wireless one, and neither was over $800. You can find them new in that range these days. Get the old console, not the new one, or find a sensor suite and add the console and datalogger (either Davis datalogger or the 3rd party one that's been discussed here). The dataloggers will connect directly to a PC, or you can use the Weatherlink Live and sniff the packets - either way works. I recently saw a complete station on eBay in the $500s - sensors, console and datalogger.

You could also go the Tempest route, which has all the datalogger stuff built in but no console, then add a tablet of some kind and the free Tempest Console package. Another packet sniffing option for weewx.

Tempest is more consumer-grade, slightly larger margins for error than Davis, but seems to be pretty close to my Davis station as far as accuracy (I have one of each). If you live in a cold/snowy/dark place (like I do - Alaska) then the Tempest needs their wired power option added, while the Davis has a power port built-in, so all you need to add is a wall wart and you're good. The Tempest power option includes battery backup (8xAA - good for days), while the Davis one is a single CR-123 (also supposed to be days). The Tempest takes a bit more thought on mounting, since it's an all-in-one design, while the Davis anemometer can be separated and put up high while the other sensors are somewhere else. 

[michael.k...@gmx.at]

The Tempest is the worst combination of drawbacks I can possibly think of, without an option for workarounds, e.g. overriding a single observation type by an extra sensor. Not to mention: the voodoo magic they do while trying to compensate the drawbacks of the all-in-one design. Besides that, I have a bad experience with their quality. Out of two Tempests I bought in 2020, five are broken by today (yes, even the spares they sent are broken in the mean time). Other than that, the Tempest isn't a personal weather station, it is a node in a sensor network, not entirely under your control.

Compared to the Wittboy, which has a similar, but in details better design, I'd always go for the Wittboy. Why? The Wittboy may have the same drawbacks as the Tempest regarding e.g. measuring outside temperature (insufficient shielding, leading to unrealistic high temperature values when the sun is low and the winds are calm), but with the Wittboy you can buy a $10-$15 extra outdoor sensor, locate it in a well-shielded housing, and override the Wittboys temperature sensor. The Tempest is, what it is, and I don't like it because it is - in my opinion and from the point of view of my understanding of a personal weather station - defective by design, in both, the hardware, and the ecosystem.

[Nate Bargmann]

If you're intending on new, check with Scaled Instruments:
https://www.scaledinstruments.com for pricing. It's likely he can
assemble a package that includes the ISS and the classic 6312 console
(the new 6313 console cannot be connected to directly by WeeWX, as I
understand it and has a lot of issues to be resolved).

You would almost certainly want a third party logger so you don't pay
for the Davis software which you'd almost certainly never use, and the
Davis logger that only comes with the software.

- Nate

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[vince]

Too many options but there are 'years' of recommendations over in https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?board=71.0 if you poke around there.

For a $300-800 price range you will likely not do better than Davis but the crazy expensive part is getting it online so you can hook it into weewx.  You also need to consider if you want a LAN-only solution like most old-school folks do.   These days most vendors (Ecowitt) require a gateway that phones home to China occasionally for software updates or watchdog heartbeat checks.  Other vendors have moved to a 'feed THEIR site' model that you can't turn off (WeatherFlow, Davis with the new console) that many people are starting to object to.

For a LAN-only solution you can get there for about $600 if you go Davis Vue sensor suite, a old-style Davis console, and their absurdly expensive logger.  That would be plug+play with no vendor accounts etc. needed.   If you go with a Meteo-Pi third party logger you're down in the $550 range or so although the Meteo-Pi has some setup needs.   Both scientificsales and scaledinstruments have been great vendors for Davis gear historically so compare the two re: price.

Reason I mention Davis is their gear seems to last forever.   If you bump up your budget and go VP2 the pieces of the puzzle are pretty replaceable as things age and stuff eventually fails, but it's really big in size.

For integrating other stuff, I use MQTT to feed Home Assistant and display on a 8" Kindle Fire tablet running free FullyKioskBrowser.  Works great.

Since you have inside sensors you probably don't need the inside console unless you really wanted one, so you could get there with a Vue sensor suite ($300), a Meteo-Pi ($85), and a Kindle Fire when you catch it on sale ($40).   That plus whatever gear you'd need to run weewx + HomeAssistant + MQTT and the time value of your labor and blood pressure.  Once you have it set up, it would run hands-off.   A pi4 would be plenty good enough to run all that stuff, although around here I offloaded HomeAssistant+ZWave+MQTT to a little i3 linux box (under Docker) for performance reasons.   I could likely fit everything on the pi4 if needed without too much worrying other than trying to minimize SD writes.

Careful with solutions that have the new Davis console.  There's no programming API there so you'd need to have the console feed Davis (ET phone home) and then your weewx setup would need to 'query' Davis for your data.  Not a fan here of those kind of things but that's where the vendors seem to be going.

[michael.k...@gmx.at]

Regarding "phone home" I plan to experiment with such devices next year https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl_433-ported-to-esp32-microcontrollers-with-cc1101-or-sx127x-transceiver-chips/

My goal is to capture all the broadcasted values from my devices, cache them locally, publish them in realtime using MQTT and make cached values available using REST. In other words: build my own GW. I didn't find any projects like that so far. In theory, it should be possible to combine any wireless sensor which is broadcasting unencrypted values, into one such gateway. My resources are very limited, so we'll see. I'm still hoping to find something out there, that solved this already in the one or the other way and made it available for the public.

It would be more than nice, if one could use his Davis UV/radiation sensor, his ecowitt rain gauge and LaCrosse anemometer to be read by a single device.

Sorry for OT!

[Greg Troxel]

"'michael.k...@gmx.at' via weewx-user" <weewx...@googlegroups.com>
writes:

> Regarding "phone home" I plan to experiment with such devices next year
> https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl_433-ported-to-esp32-microcontrollers-with-cc1101-or-sx127x-transceiver-chips/
> My goal is to capture all the broadcasted values from my devices, cache
> them locally, publish them in realtime using MQTT and make cached values
> available using REST. In other words: build my own GW. I didn't find any
> projects like that so far. In theory, it should be possible to combine any
> wireless sensor which is broadcasting unencrypted values, into one such
> gateway. My resources are very limited, so we'll see. I'm still hoping to
> find something out there, that solved this already in the one or the other
> way and made it available for the public.

As this is how weewx users can get data, I think limited discussion is
reasonably OT..

I am running 4 rtl-sdr dongles and am part of rtl_433 upstream. My
view is that to get reliable data, you need to have a receiver on each
frequency. I have one on 433.92 for Acurite devices, one on 915 MHz
for Ecowitt, one on 315 for TPMS (not weather) and a second on 433.92
for TPMS (different location) but also picks up Acurite.

rtl_433 does not receive Davis but rtldavis does. However, AIUI Davis
transmitters change frequency every transmission and the receiver knows
the pattern and changes proaactively to match, once synchronized. So I
expect that while it might be possible to make this work on an ESP (vs a
"real computer" with an SDR dongle), it is likely to take one receiver
per frequency, where Davis's hop pattern counts as a frequency
separately from normal 915.

[pannetron]

Scaled Instruments is a great suggestion.  I just ordered a Davis 6312 console, he has a few left.

[vince]

I've fiddled with all the pieces individually on raspi

Used rtl_433 to listen to Acurite and have done rtldavis+weewx for the VP2 as well as Gary's gw1000+weewx for ecowitt.  All worked fine for me, so cobbling them together would seem to be reasonable if you like that many rtl-sdr dongles.

Seems like a perfect thing to do with docker on a pi4 or small intel box since individually they're lightweight.

• one docker instance for each radio and weewx instance
• one for a MQTT broker
• one for Home Assistant to build a dashboard and/or do automation
• a small Kindle Fire for an always-on display

FWIW - that's how I do my automation currently, including HA reading my Zwave door/window sensors.