Weather station hardware 🖥️

In 2013, the DIY weather station route wasn’t for me.

A DIY station was:

• 🙃 Beyond my skillset (at the time)
• 🏴󠁵󠁳󠁣󠁯󠁿 Built with fragile, general-purpose parts that may fail when tasked with standing up to the harsh Colorado sunshine year after year

So, over time, I cobbled together an off-the-shelf solution:

• Davis Vantage Vue Wireless Integrated Sensor Suite (ISS)
• Davis Vantage Wireless Console/Receiver
• Ambient Weather WeatherMount station mount
• Davis WeatherLink® USB Data Logger
• Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
• SunFounder PCF8563 IIC I2C Real Time Clock RTC (for the Raspberry pi).

Weather station software 🌐

WeeWX is free and open-source weather station software written in Python. And it’s the heart of my system.

It has out-of-the-box support for everything I want:

• Great docs
• Local SQLite storage for weather data
• Support for sending your data over MQTT
• Uploads to PWSWeather.com, CWOP, WOW, AWEKAS, and even WUnderground (if you’re interested in gifting your data to IBM and getting bupkis for it)
• Static HTML/plain text reports, including:
  • Graphs of current and historical conditions
  • Historical climatology reports (complete with heat/cool degree days per month)

Frustrations 🤬

Raspberry Pi

In 2023, using a Raspberry Pi is a mistake.

Any of the cheapo x86 mini-pcs that retail for about $150 would be a nicer option than a Raspberry Pi.

Running WeeWX on a Raspberry Pi has some problems (all of which are well-document on their wiki):

• No hardware clock – this causes screwy date/time data following a reboot. I added an RTC module to thwart this problem.
• Write-heavy vs. SD-Cards – WeeWX is a write-heavy application, corrupting even the best sd-cards over time. I’m writing most data to a tmpfs and relying on backup and MQTT for data persistence.
• Unobtainium – In the mid-2010s, Pis were ~$40. Now, Pis are $150 for old models and infinity expensive for newer models (since you can’t find them anywhere).

Davis Vantage Vue

I’m unreasonably angry about Davis forcing me to buy a USB data logger.

Why is there no USB-out in the $275 console? It feels like punishment for eschewing open-source hardware.

Maybe something like the Meteostick would obviate the need for the console+data logger combo, but I’ve never tried it.

But the integrated sensor suite has been great: the only maintenance I do is swapping out the CR123A battery every few years (it’s mostly solar powered).

Weather data everywhere 🚀

Now that I own my own weather data: I spew it all over the place.

I publish data to:

• Citizen Weather Observer Program using my ham callsign
  • so, my data shows up on the APRS.fi map
• PWSWeather.com, and
• MQTT to Home Assistant
• Prometheus

There are weather widgets all over my house:

• My desktop’s taskbar (XMobar) shows the current outdoor and indoor temperatures
• Grafana dashboards show me the current conditions (as shown in the picture of my PocketCHIP above)
• I even have a small eink display in my bathroom to check the weather before my morning run

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