Author Topic: Remote WIFI enabled weather station needed  (Read 1045 times)

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Offline Isaac-1

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Remote WIFI enabled weather station needed
« on: May 26, 2018, 08:19:20 PM »
I need to install a weather station to monitor the conditions on the family farm about 20 miles from where I live.  There is limited (metered) internet available at the farm, and the connection is a bit unreliable (weather fade during heavy rain, etc.).  The main things I need to monitor are temperature, wind, and rain fall.  There is a wired ethernet port that I can plug into on the wifi access point, so either wired ethernet or wifi is an option.

My big concern is I need a weather station that will tolerate intermittent internet drop outs and will not require me making numerous unplanned 40 mile round trip drives to reboot things.

Absolute accuracy is not all that important on the rain gauge, I live in Louisiana where we often have afternoon thermal thunderstorms in the spring and summer so it may come a downpour in one spot and be completely dry a couple of hundred feet away.

One important issue, is whatever I buy needs to be able to operate in outdoor ambient temperatures, as there is no full time climate controlled structure available to house the interface box, and there is no available windows computer to plug a USB interface into.  The WIFI access point / router is located in a well pump shed.

A local display would be nice, but not really necessary since everyone seem to carry a smart phone with them these days.

I am considering the Ambient Weather WS-0900 as a possibility and would like your thoughts, as well as thoughts on the WS 2902, and WS 1401 and any other comparable units you might suggest I consider.

Ideally I would like something that could buffer its readings then upload them when there is an available internet connection so as to avoid data drop outs when there may be a temporary rain fade net connection event.  Data use is also  concern, which I read has been somewhat addressed in recent firmware updates on most Ambient Weather products.

thanks for your thoughts

Offline waiukuweather

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Re: Remote WIFI enabled weather station needed
« Reply #1 on: May 26, 2018, 08:40:15 PM »
the weatherflow station does cover some of your needs

Offline Aussie Susan

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Re: Remote WIFI enabled weather station needed
« Reply #2 on: May 27, 2018, 10:48:59 PM »
I have a slightly more elaborate solution that might help.
I have a Raspberry Pi that uses the WeeWx software to connect to the weather station console. The Rpi also runs a web server (I use nginx but Apache is also a good choice- basically anything will do).
You can then access the weather data (and historical data) via any web browser that is pointed to your web server.
Power-wise, the Rpi uses very little (I use a Rpi-Zero for my setup, although I do use a NAS drive to save sear-and-tear on the SD drive: many people have got really good reliability from good quality SD drives for considerable periods of time). Also it can be set up to restart everything automatically when the power comes back on.
My weather station is a HP1000/WS1001 clone which picks up lost data from the outdoor unit if the power fails. I use a WeeWx plug-in that I wrote that will read historical data from the weather station console with it starts up and so there is normally very little data loss, even over power failures. (Not guaranteed using my setup but I'm happy with the results.)
Once you have a web server running, then you can extend its functionality in others ways (remote power cycling, web cam etc. - let the imagination run wild) so that it should run unattended.
Each part of the above has many different options and it is really the concept I'm trying to suggest here.
Susan


 

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