Weather Station Hardware > What Weather Station Should I Buy?

What do you want to see in a low-cost station?

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vinceskahan:
You're going to have to bound the cost max for us.

I would like to see something in the WeatherFlow Tempest $350 range but without its hacks and limitations.


* be able to run LAN-only with 'no' Internet connectivity required ever
* have the sensors just.plain.work. right out of the box
* be able to add low-cost display (ala kindle fire running a web browser or the like)
* have a quality local API for programming interfaces to the data.  Perhaps MQTT, maybe a UDP broadcast ala WeatherFlow, maybe REST.
* have an affordable quality datalogger with some kind of battery backup and catchup if power is list
* I prefer no requirement for wifi, with available wired ethernet ideally, but if wifi support 5GHz too
Another way of looking at it is think of a Vantage Vue and add an 'affordable' datalogger to it, and a good API like WeatherFlow's.

Basically make it capable of running lan-only and being weewx-friendly.

n1vg:

--- Quote from: stevenh on March 16, 2023, 05:56:19 PM ---Also, is monitor screen burn still a thing with big non-moving characters? That is why Led's may be old school, but just work.

--- End quote ---

I think burn-in isn't so much a problem anymore. Personally I really wanted to make an outdoor readable display for the local paraglider training hill but it took me years to find a flip-dot display at a reasonable price and I still haven't gotten around to building a driver for it.

A Weather Picture device would be a great application for our UV flatbed printer - all of the graphics could be printed in-house on glass or acrylic. I just hate to depend on that beast for anything - it's been down more than it's been running and it takes daily attention.

n1vg:

--- Quote from: vinceskahan on March 16, 2023, 08:48:42 PM ---You're going to have to bound the cost max for us.

I would like to see something in the WeatherFlow Tempest $350 range but without its hacks and limitations.

Basically make it capable of running lan-only and being weewx-friendly.

--- End quote ---

I think I'd set a limit of about $400 for any station we were going to produce, and I'd like to keep it under $250. And don't worry, I am very much set on NOT making it dependent on any cloud-based anything. In fact going forward I think that's likely to be a central theme in our offerings. Silicon Valley and Shenzhen both are fixated on producing products that require an internet connection whether it's necessary for their function or not, with proprietary protocols - if they have APIs at all, it's through their cloud service and not for the device itself. I hate it, and it doesn't work for many of the use cases we cater to.

I'm also more than 5 weeks in to trying to get control of my company Facebook page back after Meta locked out my personal account because of a hack. 5 weeks without being able to even get a human to acknowledge the problem. To say I am not on board with the direction the tech industry is going in that respect would be an understatement. People need to be able to own their own stuff, and not depend on the whims of faceless companies that might render their own products useless by going under or just ceasing to support an old product.

stevenh:
I look at the weather station as two pieces. The instruments and the display.
As noted here, most of the displays are tiny and made for desktops. I'm old and like big displays!
I took another look at available weather software and found a reference to weatherwizz.
It looks like it will work for my use case. I have many old monitors and a several RPi's kicking around.
Still tweaking the display and need to send support a message on if the black color of the graph can be changed.
Overall I happy with the custom setup.

Steve   

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