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Putting a dumb weather station on the internet
- brna-2 1y agoI was kinda expecting analogue tech and computer vision here. :D Nice work.
- dylan604 1y agoThe very first cable weather "channel" was a large circular base at least 4' diameter (don't remember exact size, but big) that had various full size gauges on it. A camera was positioned to look down on the gauge under it. The whole table top rotated so that each gauge would continuously cycle under the camera. When you viewed the channel, you'd have to wait until the gauge you wanted to see rotated back around.
- Thev00d00 1y ago"If you want to support me, send me AA batteries" in the bot account profile made me chuckle.
- eternauta3k 1y agoHoly cow, cheap weather stations are encoding and decoding JSON? What a century.
- mungoman2 1y agoNo, the tool rtl_433 repackages payload data in json for easier downstream consumption.
- dn3500 1y agoYou might consider joining the Citizen Weather Observer Program. It's a great way to share your data with other station owners. http://www.wxqa.com/ http://www.wxqa.com/ I had a station for a few years. The receiver had a usb interface so no software radio required. I used weewx to import the data. I even had a water temperature sensor off the end of my dock so I could see if the lake was warm enough to swim in.
- Havoc 1y agoUk weather office has a similar effort apparently - select registered sites and disable the official ones here: https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/ https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/ Interesting to see that it gets many submissions from outside UK too
- phito 1y agoCool project but I would just have used a zigbee/wifi weather station, they are just as cheap.
- 3D30497420 1y agoI get the sense from the article that part of the fun was doing this via radio frequencies rather than having to deal with a network. > At this point, we've connected the Temu weather station to the Internet and the ham radio network. Anyone with an APRS-enabled radio, digipeater, receiver, or just a web browser can see what the temperature and humidity are at my house.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agolinks? the closest thing is 10x the price, some are more like $80, some $180
- pastel8739 1y agoNearly all off the shelf weather station parts use 433Mhz or similar bands. It’s likely that if you have any preexisting wireless temp sensors, etc that transmit to an indoor display, you can use those with a system like this. I also think that range and battery life is better for these simpler sensors.
- BenjiWiebe 1y agoWi-Fi is pretty bad for battery powered devices.
- the_gipsy 1y agoI want to do the reverse: I have a DIY esp32 "weather" station (temp/humidity but more importantly particle sensor) and I would love to share it via radio!
- Tepix 1y agoI expected "putting something on the internet" to mean being to talk to a device directly, not taking its data and publishing it somewhere. Is it just me?
- mamsouuu 1y ago[dead]
- IAmBroom 1y agoYes.
- pastel8739 1y agoAll this device ever does is publish results, so it’s not clear what interacting directly would mean
- Tepix 1y agoMostly looking for vulnerabilities, probably
- netsharc 1y agoMan, the interesting bits like decoding the radio signals to temperature isn't even in the article. Also, the temperature measurement is probably not accurate to 2 decimal places, but the "toot" converts 7.2 C to 44.96 F. Someone needs to learn about significant digits.
- BenjiWiebe 1y agoW.r.t. decoding signals to temperatures: They mention using rtl_433 which is an awesome piece of software that does that for you.
- puterbonga 1y agoEvery time someone does a project like this, it exposes how trivial “IoT” really is once you strip away vendor lock in and buzzwords. A $3 sensor, a 10 line script, and a 40 year old ham protocol outperform half the commercial weather APIs out there.
- XorNot 1y agoThere's a magical world out there where Tuya leave us with the ability to OTA flash custom firmware of we have physical access, and then we can all just run ESPHome on private wifi networks.
- dylan604 1y agoAnd what recovery mechanisms do you have in place when the OTA flash goes wrong?
- yapyap 1y agosame recovery mechanism as when the Crowdstrike OTA goes wrong
- kobalsky 1y agoyou can have 2 identical partitions on the ESP, the OTA flashes the inactive partition and signals to bootloader to attempt to boot it from there. the device is restarted, if the new firmware is working correctly you signal the update process that everything is all right and it sets the new partition as default. if the device doesn't boot correctly, or your sanity checks don't pass, either you or the watchdog restarts the device and it boot from the known-working partition.
- dylan604 1y agoI didn't ask what can you have. We could have whatever safety processes we wanted with multiple levels of redundancy. However, that's not what's available on COTS IoT devices though, so speculation does not help. Flashing the firmware of a cheap IoT device remotely OTA is not without risk.
- defraudbah 1y agothis is one of the most fascinating and funniest articles i've read in a while
- digitalsushi 1y agomy winter project is to create a container pod at home that remixes media, maybe adds in some old or joke tv commercials between shows, and most importantly, shows the weather and the route to work at 7am. i think everything exists to do this, but it might take a few weeks to cobble together.
- auspiv 1y agoFor even more retro points, have the UI presented by WeatherStar! https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com/ https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com/
- WaitWaitWha 1y agoSlightly tangential, my hope is that the Blitzortung project picks up momentum. > Blitzortung.org and Lightningmaps.org are world-wide non-commercial low-cost community-based lightning detection and lightning location networks. They provide free real time lightning maps for a lot of count [docs of the projects](https://docs.lightningmaps.org https://docs.lightningmaps.org) [real-time lightening map](https://map.blitzortung.org https://map.blitzortung.org)
- joezydeco 1y agoThe sensor network is great, the website is long in the tooth.
- xd1936 1y agoI was very grateful to the author for `aprs-weather-submit` while building cwop.rest. Great post.
- Havoc 1y agoBeen meaning to DIY a weather solution too...just need to figure out how to power it on balcony (no power). Thinking perhaps via the new sodium batteries & explore that too while at it.
- seemaze 1y agoIf you live in a moderately dense area or know a neighbor who also has a weather station, you might try the command line utility rtl_433[0] mentioned in the article with an SDR dongle to pick up existing broadcasts in your area. I pick up three different stations consistently! [0]https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
- Havoc 1y agoI did try it a while back and only picked up industrial fridges...presumably a restaurant...apparently those run on same tech Moving soon though so should give it another try then
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoThis reminds me... My parents gave me a smart weather station for Christmas a few years ago. I never even took it out of the box. I know it exposes a web server so I can view a fancy UI in my browser... I should take it out of the box and run a pentest on it. I imagine it's pretty insecure. The developers of these types of things often don't consider security.
- hyperbovine 1y agoWhat’s the best homebrew weather station out there? Currently I’ve got my eye on https://3dpaws.comet.ucar.edu/ https://3dpaws.comet.ucar.edu/ but interested to hear about others.