Monitoring my weather at home

A few years after that I also purchased a Purple Air PM2.5 monitor. I was pleasantly surprised that this device exposes a local REST interface for polling the data. Naturally, I wrote purpleair2mqtt[1] to pull the data from that and post to MQTT and InfluxDB.

Together these two applications and pieces of hardware give me a great view of the weather conditions. And like the author of the article, I found that other weather information tended to be off significantly. Doubly true as I live next to a lake in a rural-ish part of New England which is about 500ft higher than the city and airport where our weather data comes from. Over the last couple of years I've been pleased to see that my data has become the defacto source for weather data in my town (I publish it to numerous sources) and that the PM2.5 information gets brought into lots of reports, including the EPA's AirNow system - which is great, because it doesn't look like there's another PM2.5 monitor within 20 miles of me.

[0]: https://github.com/pridkett/ambient2mqtt [1]: https://github.com/pridkett/purpleair2mqtt

For me the most important thing is not the accuracy but having easier access to certain metrics to make better decisions. Feels Like and wind are a priority for me. Also UV Index during summer (I live in Florida). I want to know the best days to ride. I also want to know if I should use a thermal base layer or leg warmers. I’m willing to accept some discomfort during the first hour if it will get warmer later. Some rain is acceptable when is warmer. No rain is acceptable when its cold.

Will I have a headwind on the way back? Then I should manage my energy better during the first half.

As long as I see the big picture quickly for the whole week, I’m Ok with accuracy being less than perfect.

WeeWX is one of those hackers projects that I just love. It's not pretty, and a lot of the edges are real rough, but damn, it just works, all day, everyday, and stores data in sqlite with a funky, but beautiful HTML output as well.

https://weatherflow.com/tempest-weather-system/

      And if eink weather displays in the bathroom are unappealing to you, I just don’t understand what you’re doing here.

Anyway, to collect weather data from Davis station, I highly recommend https://www.smartbedded.com/wiki/index.php/Meteostick

It is very simple to use and works really well - it is also supported by WeeWX through an out-of-tree driver, but is easy to setup. It also allows you to keep your console in your living room while you collect data in your basement.

When I was putting together my DIY weather station I got this weather meter kit [1] from Sparkfun that includes a rain gauge, a wind vane, and an anemometer.

Later I realized that because of all the tall trees all around my neighborhood (Western Washington) and the less tall trees at my house and the house itself being in the way the wind direction and speed a couple meters above the ground near my house would not really be all that interesting.

In retrospect I wish I had just bought the rain gauge. Sparkfun doesn't sell that separately but Argent Data Systems has a product that seems to be identical to the Sparkfun one [2], but they also sell the individual sensors separately. Here's the rain gauge [3].

[2] https://www.argentdata.com/catalog/product_info.php?products...

[3] https://www.argentdata.com/catalog/product_info.php?products...

If you don't mind a DIY approach you can use ESPHome to quickly integrate some low cost sensor modules (e.g. BME280s).

I know a few rural folk that would love to dabble in this sort of thing.