Building a weather station | Hacker News Reader

Building a weather station

drwho.virtadpt.net

56 pointstodsacerdoti16 comments

This is kinda neat, just the other day I was reading about Weewx[1], a FOSS project to allow "roll-your-own" weather stations.

My in-laws have a pretty fancy weather station in their backyard, but its tied to a proprietary LCD weather screen in their living room. I've admired it for a while but daydreamed about building my own more flexible system when I get a house.

[1] https://weewx.com/

Why wait?

Those fancy weather stations often transmit to the indoor LCD display using fairly simply messages sent in the 433 MHz band or the 915 MHz band. For many those message formats have been reverse engineered and decoders for them added to open source SDR software such as rtl_433 [1].

With a $30 USB RTL-SDR and rtl_433 you can then use the sensor units from many of those fancy units as inputs to your own display and analysis software. And you can often use your neighbors' sensors too. One of my neighbors--I still haven't figured out which--has an AcuRite 5-in-1 system and I can see its readings using my RTL-SDR and rtl_433.

If you build your own sensors it is cheap and easy to add a 433 MHz transmitter and define your own message format. Rtl_433 can be extended to cover new message formats by giving it a config file that describes the formats.

There's a driver for Weewx to let it use rtl_433 [3].

You can get an RTL-SDR and rtl_433 now, and start playing around with whatever sensors others in your neighborhood happen to have.

[1] https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433

[2] https://www.acurite.com/shop-all/weather-instruments/weather...

[3] https://github.com/matthewwall/weewx-sdr

I have found the BIOS Jumbo Weather Station (https://biosmedical.com/products/bios-weather-jumbo-weather-...) to be reliable and easy to read.

I am just a satisfied customer. But it could be fun to reverse engineer the data for use with an R.Pi.

Strong +1, RTL-SDR + rpi makes a great little platform. We have a couple weather/temp sensors from various brands and rtl_433 picks them in with no issues, throw all the data into Grafana/Influx and then visualize/export however you want.

>Why wait?

Because I live in an apartment and don't have a place to put one, but that's my own thing

Thank you for all that info!! This is why I love commenting on HN

"There are eight basic directions: North, south, east, west, northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest. One switch for each in the weather vane, but only two wires for all of them. But how?"

One of the first projects that I took on did a similar thing where there were 4 buttons all connected to one pin on an Arduino. Having next to 0 official EE schooling, this technique impressed me with its simplicity. Just need to ensure that the resistance of each one allows for space between the +/- tolerances of an analog signal. It's also one of those little "tricks" that makes me want to keep finding other new things and keep going.

Got distracted by the noises while scrolling the page.

If anyone is curious it is using this: https://theonion.github.io/fartscroll.js/

But why? The page has lost all credibility.

I have no idea why they have chosen to use that.

Because it's funny.

Looks like aside from fartscroll they also tried to add a konami code. I couldn't trigger it though.

I didn't even get that far! I was curious about the font being used (turns out it's Lato) so I right clicked to examine an element and boy did that fart scare me something awful!

I honestly thought I was going crazy for a few minutes.

I suppose "glands" means rubber grommets?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_gland

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