Hello
I am a newbie in this hobby and I am searching around to setup my first Weather Station
What I want is a way to monitor remotely the weather conditions and to keep historical records.
I am not really interested in a local console to display the data (but if available, it would be welcome).
The weather station will be setup in an agricultural area of low altitude in Northern Greece. The (usual) temperatures and weather generally in the area are not extreme. The location of the setup has mains power and internet (via mobile network) and I also have a raspberry pi. I prefer to use ethernet connection for internet connectivity, although wifi is not a deal breaker if it is needed for a really important feature.
I would really like to NOT be tied to specific vendor solutions and avoid situations that have already occurred in the past with cloud services that have been shutdown. Also paying monthly costs for any cloud service is undesirable. So the "device" used to push data should be able to push data directly to non vendor specific services like Weather Underground (and this is where the raspberry will be useful!). Also I am looking for something on the "affordable" side of things.
I initially searched for wired weather station (wire routing for the connection would be no problem for my setup) to avoid having to deal with battery changes. But as I found out the weather stations that support this (like davis vp2) are relatively expensive especially with the extra hardware needed to support all requirements for remote monitoring via internet. Then I also read about possible lightning dangers with wired stations (the cable would bring the lightning indoors!) so I decided to go with wireless connection from sensors to the base.
The next thing I searched was ethernet connectivity for internet. I found 2 solutions for this, one being Davis WeatherLink Live. Reading around about this, it seems that data are uploaded to weather link cloud and then they can be pushed to other services (like WU). I could not find any info if there is a way to send these data directly to some other arbitrary service. So this creates an undesirable tie to the vendor cloud services.
Then I came across ecowitt GW2000 (as a set with WS90) which apart from being more affordable, allows (as the manual says) to send data to multiple servers including WU and "your own defined server"! I then found out about "weewx" with "weewx-interceptor" that can "listen" for data sent from any client using "ecowitt" protocol and then "translate" it to aprs packets using "weewx-aprs" which can then be pushed to APRS-IS with "aprx". The raspberry pi I have available could be used to install Weewx and Aprx.
Links for the notes:
https://osswww.ecowitt.net/uploads/20220803/GW2000%20Manual.pdfhttps://github.com/matthewwall/weewx-interceptorhttps://github.com/cavedon/weewx-aprsSo I would like some feedback if possible about the following:
* Will the setup mentioned above with GW2000 and raspberry with weewx work as I expect it to? More specifically can the "customized" weather server configured in GW2000 be an IP in the local LAN and NOT something available on the internet (meaning is the data pushed from the device itself to the customized server, or is it uploaded to ecowitt cloud and then pushed to the customized server from there?)
* And last but not least, does the "ECOWITT Wittboy" weather station set (GW2000 and WS90) provide accurate (good for the price at least) values? Is it durable enough to last a few years?
* Any suggestion where to buy the weather station in Europe (or Greece)?
And of course any other suggestion or further information are welcome!
