Hyper Local Weather
I remember my grandpa teaching me how to read the analog barometer in his house and he always had some sort of standalone digital indoor/outdoor weather station. I have ALWAYS wanted some sort of personal weather station and over the past couple of years of feeding more and more data into our home automation platform this gave me the push to find something connected.
Most of the consumer personal weather stations are based off of the same sensor hardware which has driven the price down over the past few years. The station that had the cleanest integration and price for me was from Ecowitt. They are a China based repackager with good software and easy e-commerce. They also have many different sensors beyond the weather station we bought to extend visibility into soil moisture, lightning detection, and air quality (AQI).
The package we bought: https://www.ecowitt.com/shop/goodsDetail/244
We have a LOT of very large trees so trying to get the PWS as high as possible but also easy to access for service left me we just a few spots that were also aesthetically pleasing. I found a corner in the back of our house that was just right with a clear view of the sky for accurate rain and solar measurement. Keeping it simple I used a galvanized fence rail with chainlink straps to attach to the house.
The station attaches to the post with two u-bolts and you orient it in a marked cardinal direction so the wind bearing vane is calibrated correctly. The station is powered by a small PV cell on the top of the unit and battery powered at night. I put 2x Lithium AAs in it and am interested to see how long they last.
The station connects via 915mHz RF to a tiny little USB powered gateway installed indoors which then connects to your home wifi. From there, this gateway publishes weather data to a number of destinations below:
Ecowitt.net - Ecowitt’s free weather portal hosted on Alibaba. I am not super stoked about sending data to China so I have actually blocked this domain and address space so the gateway cannot connect to this service.
Weather Underground - This is a very cool public service that you can publish your PWS data to that has great visualization and offers a great service to your neighborhood. You can find mine here: https://bit.ly/nassauweather
WeatherCloud - A Barcelona based PWS aggregation service. I have not played with this option yet but it looks pretty cool with features like posting weather data to Twitter based on triggers.
Weather Observations Website - This is a UK site for weather aggregation funded by the Royal Meteorological Society as a public services. I have not played with this one either but looking at their maps, there is a ton of crowdsourced data.
Customized - This is the one that was the #1 selling point for me. It gives you the ability to point to a local host on a websocket. Our home automation system has an integration that supports capturing this data out of the box. This makes the possibilities literal endless.
This is just a simple static display of the current conditions but this is just the beginning! All of the data is written to an Influx database instance that can be graphed or manipulated to take actions on.
A couple of ideas that are already bouncing around in my head:
Using the barometric pressure reading to drive a trend variable that can be used to alert Wendi a migraine may be coming on.
Leveraging solar radiation reading to control turning outdoor lights on and off rather than relying on sunrise/sunset times.
Simply aggregating Darksky forecasting with my current temp/wind readings for hyper local weather.
Rain notifications to tell us to bring in the patio cushions.
Adapting indoor light levels based on outside ambient lighting.
Pausing or modifying irrigation schedules based on rainfall. This can be even further optimized with soil moisture sensors.
So many possibilities! What would you do with data from a personal weather station?
The temperature and wind speed/direction in the top right come from the PWS. Forecast data comes from either the NWS or Darksky.