Re: [weewx-user] Digest for weewx-user@googlegroups.com - 7 updates in 1 topic

[Nick Kavanagh]

Thanks so much for the opinions and links. Got some good starting points now, especially now I'm aware of some good places to look for used equipment to be able to assemble something that does not "phone home". I had no idea that the newer Davis gear did that.

With the Accurite, I was able to make everything work on a dedicated Pi 4, with sdr and mqtt. I used sdr to get packets from the Accurite and Accurite sensors, while my homemade (ESP32 boards with various bme and bmr sensors) fed weewx through mqtt. The ESP32's sensors seem to agree with one another within a tight range, and I'm pretty pleased with them. The Accurite sensors for outdoors often disagreed by quite a lot, not on the mast but their addon temp and lightning sensors. In fact the lightning sensor was so often incorrect that I just dropped it. So I like the idea of the big startup Davis Christmas purchase and adding the extra sensors once a month.

We had a significant wind event here Monday and my internal weather-geek was very disappointed I couldn't measure it!

Again, thanks to all of you. Now, I'm going shopping!

On Wed, Dec 20, 2023, 06:47 <weewx...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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• Best Davis station for my buck, and purpose? - 7 Updates

Best Davis station for my buck, and purpose?

Nick Kavanagh <kavanag...@gmail.com>: Dec 19 10:46AM -0500 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" <michael.k...@gmx.at>: Dec 19 08:05AM -0800 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.   Nick Kavanagh schrieb am Dienstag, 19. Dezember 2023 um 16:46:54 UTC+1:

Tom Hogland <tom.h...@gmail.com>: Dec 19 10:02AM -0800 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" <michael.k...@gmx.at>: Dec 19 10:28AM -0800 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.   Tom Hogland schrieb am Dienstag, 19. Dezember 2023 um 19:02:08 UTC+1:

Nate Bargmann <n0...@n0nb.us>: Dec 19 01:57PM -0600 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   -- "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." Web: https://www.n0nb.us Projects: https://github.com/N0NB GPG fingerprint: 82D6 4F6B 0E67 CD41 F689 BBA6 FB2C 5130 D55A 8819

vince <vince...@gmail.com>: Dec 19 12:48PM -0800 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" <michael.k...@gmx.at>: Dec 19 11:22PM -0800 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!     vince schrieb am Dienstag, 19. Dezember 2023 um 21:48:43 UTC+1:

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[Nate Bargmann]

* On 2023 20 Dec 14:01 -0600, Nick Kavanagh wrote:
> Thanks so much for the opinions and links. Got some good starting points
> now, especially now I'm aware of some good places to look for used
> equipment to be able to assemble something that does not "phone home". I
> had no idea that the newer Davis gear did that.

The latest Davis console, the 6313, does that for updates which is one
thing, but it can only upload to the Davis Weather Link site, as I
understand, which is quite another thing. One either needs to forward
it from there to other services such as WU or CWOP, which the following
thread discusses, or download it into WeeWX to do your own thing with
your data (does that require a paid subscription?).

https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=45032.0

That is a long thread about the 6313--the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Quite simply, weather is big business and these manufacturers are
seeking to monetize as much of that as they can. Designing the
equipment so it can only work with their service is one way of doing so.
Suffice it to say, I'm not on board with that!