WeeWX considerations in shopping for sensors/hardware

[Gregory]

Hello,

This is sort of a "what weather station should I buy" question, but I think it's appropriate to ask here because I'm planning my setup around WeeWX and there are some considerations relevant to that.

I'm planning to set up WeeWX in a Docker container on a server in my home. I haven't yet decided on weather station hardware, in part because I'm unsure about how that choice will affect connecting to and interoperability with WeeWX. I want to connect the sensors to WeeWX within my home network, i.e. I do not want to upload data from the weather station to a cloud service and then download the data from the cloud to WeeWX.

I had been intending to purchase a Davis Vantage Pro 2, but it appears that I would have to use Davis's Weatherlink cloud service to get the data into WeeWX. If I'm mistaken about this, could someone please correct me and tell me how I would make the connection (something needs to connect to my router, whether via WiFi or ethernet cable). If it isn't possible to connect a Vantage Pro directly to my home network, then could you recommend a different manufacturer? My priorities for the weather station are:

1. Connects directly to WeeWX (no internet link).
2. Sensor accuracy and reliability (serviceable hardware is great).
3. Able to add additional sensors (mostly temp, but also soil moisture, etc.) in different locations.
   

My budget is $1,000 and I'd like to stay well under that if possible, but the priorities above are more important than keeping cost to an absolute minimum. It would be nice to have an attractive console with the system, but that's not a high priority because I'm thinking I could just use a web browser on an old iPad to view a page served by WeeWX.

Thanks in advance!

Gregory

[Sean Curry]

Hi Gregory,

I gave an almost 20 year old Davis Vantage Pro2 weather station that has been very reliable. The only problem now is that the little solar panel doesn't charge very well, and I have to replace the battery more often. I have the indoor wireless console that also still works well. To connect to my iMac and WeeWX, I have a wireless Davis Weather Envoy that also picks up the Vantage Pro2 signal, and feeds the data locally to my iMac via a Serial/USB connection. All this works perfectly with WeeWX.

Sean

[Karen K]

Gregory schrieb am Mittwoch, 18. September 2024 um 19:26:07 UTC+2:

I had been intending to purchase a Davis Vantage Pro 2, but it appears that I would have to use Davis's Weatherlink cloud service to get the data into WeeWX. If I'm mistaken about this, 

No, there are other possibilities than using Davis's cloud.

One possibility is to use the old console together with an adaptor 6510SER, 6510USB, or (if you can get a used one) 6555 IP. The other possibility is to use the WeatherLink Live 6100 device. You need Davis's cloud to configure that device, but you do not need the cloud to get the readings out of the device. There are several drivers for WeeWX to do that. 

[Wayne]

Sean -

What weewx driver do you then use to interface weewx to the Davis Envoy? Also, from my reading on the Davis website this solution requires the Davis WeatherLink data logger be installed in the Envoy. Is this how your system is configured?

If it works in the manner you're describing this would be a way around having to retrieve your data from the Davis "Cloud". I am surprised Davis still sells this solution given their current data capture philosophy! Of course, it costs extra $$$.

Wayne

[vince]

For Davis specifically, there are a variety of options and prices.  Davis sensors are absurdly expensive too.

The main problem is there is no way to get data off the new tablet-looking Davis console so it's a non-starter for LAN-only so you need to either use the old consoles which are getting harder to find these days, or cobble together something custom to work around that limitation.

Cheapest way I can think of is:

• buy the VP2 ISS sensor suite standalone ($500)
• add a RTL-SDR dongle and antenna ($50) and run the rtl-davis weewx driver
• run the excellent Belchertown weewx skin for a nice dashboard
• and use free FullyKioskBrowser on a cheapo Kindle Fire ($40 - $100 depending on size)

That'll get you all the outside readings.  If you want inside temperature and pressure you'd need to cobble together a BME280 breadboard thing, which is easy to do if you want to play developer for a bit.  Cost there would be under $20 plus the price of an old raspi to connect it to.  Many ways to get there.

(I'll ignore the very inexpensive Ecowitt gear because its gateway 'does' need internet connectivity, but their T+H sensors are excellent.  I have those plus their soil moisture and soil temp sensors too.  Gary's gw1000 driver for the ecowitt gateways works great.  I've run that in docker and vagrant/Parallels and vagrant/VirtualBox for a long time and it is very stable.)

There are a zillion other ways to get there for Davis all centered around finding the old ugly LCD-looking Davis console

• find an old ugly LCD-looking Davis console, even a used one, and add the ridiculously expensive ($195) Davis 6510USB datalogger to it (or 6510SER plus serial2usb dongle), connected to your weewx host.  Just hide the ugly console someplace if you don't want to look at it.   This adds excellent datalogging capability and it's super power-loss safe.  Nice thing about the ancient Davis console is it can handle 'long' power outages, and the datalogger holds a week+ of records just in case.
• there are a lot of third-party dataloggers as well, but given your price point just go Davis and pay da'man.  It works.

Re: the ancient consoles, the Davis 6351 Vue console ($260 or so) 'should' work a VP2 sensor suite but you'd need to verify that.  The VP2 console is getting a little hard to find.

I'm sure you'll get a lot of answers from other folks with creative solutions.  Really comes down to how many pieces of the puzzle are too many and whether you're ok with doing a little development of a custom solution that works for you.

For vendors, ScaledInstruments and ScientificSales are both great, and both guys answer questions.  They used to play off each other a little for prices but not so much these days, so check both sites out to get an idea of prices.

On Wednesday, September 18, 2024 at 10:26:07 AM UTC-7 Gregory wrote:

[Gregory]

The WeatherLink Live 6100 looks promising, as does the Wireless Weather Envoy. It seems like the main difference is that the Envoy would connect directly to my server via USB port, whereas the WeatherLink Live 6100 would connect to my router and then be discoverable as a network device. In either case, I'd need the appropriate driver, which is readily available. Did I get that right?

[Gregory]

Vince,

Thanks for writing such a thorough response! I'm seeing Vantage Pro 2 systems on eBay with the passive radiation shield and the old console, and they're within my budget. Add the USB datalogger and I can connect that to my server. That might be the "least friction" option, which would be pretty nice given I don't have a ton of extra time right now.

Cheers,

Gregory

[Dan Hinckley]

You can also use a Metobridge Nano or Nano SD which plugs right into the VP2, though from what I understand that may be useful only in the previous model, not the current one. List of resellers.

It has the advantages of being able to do uploads to many weather sites w/o going through WeeWx, as well as generating its own charts and graphs.

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[jerry...@gmail.com]

I've been using the WifiLogger2 for about 6 years without any problems.  Running on a 5 minute interval 24/7.  Plugs into VP2 console, connects to a wifi network and is picked up by WeeWX running on MacOS server.

I think I got it from Scaled Instruments in Florida.
 

[Sean Curry]

I'm using the standard Davis Vantage driver, version 3.6.2 according to weectl device --info.

And yes, I have the data logger installed in the Envoy. It has been a long time since I set this up, so had to double check. 

Sean

[Charlie Fortner]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024, at 18:42, jerry...@gmail.com wrote:

I've been using the WifiLogger2 for about 6 years without any problems.

I'm another happy WiFiLogger customer. I've got two, an older WifiLogger 1 which is at a remote location and a slightly newer WiFiLogger2. Both work very well. I bought them from Scaled Instruments. WiFiLoggers only work with the VantageVue or VantagePro consoles. They don't work with the newer WeatherLink consoles. (The WeatherLink consoles are nice looking, but Davis locking them down so your data is only available via their cloud services is a real dirtbag move.)

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024, at 14:56, vince wrote:

• add a RTL-SDR dongle and antenna ($50) and run the rtl-davis weewx driver
  

I've also tried this method and it worked great. But I already had the console and a logger, so I just did the rtl method as an experiment.

Charlie

[John Kline]

> On Sep 18, 2024, at 7:43 PM, Charlie Fortner <cha...@rentrof.net> wrote:
>
> but Davis locking them down so your data is only available via their cloud services is a real dirtbag move.

I don’t believe Davis is doing this. As far as I can tell, the Envoys continue to be offered. I just bought 4 wireless Envoys recently. Envoys continue to be listed on the Davis site, although they are hard to find there without searching for them.

What Davis has done is to make the USB data logger route $200 more expensive. (That’s the price I paid for them at Scientific Sales.)

[Tom Keffer]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 8:25 PM 'John Kline' via weewx-user <weewx...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

What Davis has done is to make the USB data logger route $200 more expensive.  (That’s the price I paid for them at Scientific Sales.)

Especially when all that's in it is an Atmel 45DB chip, worth about $0.50!

[Gregory]

I had a helpful conversation with Ryan at Scaled Instruments yesterday, and I'm pretty sure that the combination of Envoy + data logger (either wifi or ethernet) is what will work best for me. It's a bit of a bummer that the additional hardware will cost over $300, just to get my data onto my computer, but I think it'll be a "buy once, cry once" situation that should just work for me for many years afterwards.

[David Trebacz]

If it helps I've used envoy/davis logger combination for about 15 years with my Vantage Pro/Weewx/wview. It earned a spot in my heart...

[Charlie Fortner]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024, at 23:25, 'John Kline' via weewx-user wrote:
>> On Sep 18, 2024, at 7:43 PM, Charlie Fortner <cha...@rentrof.net> wrote:
>>
>> but Davis locking them down so your data is only available via their cloud services is a real dirtbag move.
>
> I don’t believe Davis is doing this. As far as I can tell, the Envoys
> continue to be offered.

My dirtbag comment was referring to Davis' WeatherLink console (the new color touchscreen console). There's no local data access with this console. There's no good reason the WeatherLink console can't expose an API for getting data directly from it. I look forward to the day someone releases an alternative firmware that will allow local access.

Charlie