Getting started

[Ed Greenberg]

Now that I own a house, I'd like to put up a weather station.  It'd be great to upload to various places that want it.  It'd also be cool to put up a webcam.

My skillsets are linux, unix and networking.   I own a Raspberry Pi that isn't doing anything.

My house has several open areas where various data gathering units could be placed.  I have a reasonably open area for a rain gauge.  I could put the anemometer on a pole from the eaves, or similar. 

I understand that there are wifi based stations that do the data collection wirelessly, but I would imagine all these items need power, right?

Then there is the question of whose equipment to buy.  I could budget up to about $300 to get started.  Any suggestions?

Any pointers to a getting started document, for weather stations, not necessarily for weewx, would be very helpful.

Thanks,

Ed Greenberg
Queensbury, NY

[Ted Garrison]

Ed - 

 

Welcome. 

 

 I'm sure you'll get other responses as well, but a lot of good info can be found through this page on Weather Underground.

 

http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/setup.asp

 

Ted

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[Thomas Keffer]

Unquestionably, the best "semi-professional" weather station out there is the Davis Vantage series. The VantageVue 6250 would be in your price range. It has a solar collector and a wireless connectivity, so it does not need any wires. NB: the wireless connection is not WiFi. It is a much more sophisticated, low-power, frequency hopping protocol. Shop around. Expect to pay about $280.

Unfortunately, to hook the station up to a computer, you need one of the Davis "data loggers", such as the 6510SER or 6510USB, and they are pretty expensive for what you get. Expect to spend about $120. It includes their "WeatherLink" software, which runs under Windows, and which you will promptly throw away and never use. :-)

All in, you're up around $400. 

If you're truly a hardcore hobbyist, you can make your own serial cable to the Vantage and avoid buying the logger. Here's a thread that summarizes the state-of-the-art in how to do this. There are even some efforts to reverse engineer the RF protocol that Davis uses, plucking the info out of the air.

If that is still too much, the Oregon Scientific WMR100N or WMR968 or the Fine Offset 1080 or 1090 instruments will all work and cost a lot less. Just don't expect them to be as reliable, nor as accurate, as the Davis instruments.

Hope this helps!

-tk

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