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Ambient Weather and Ecowitt and other Fine Offset clones / Re: new firmware for WS80: v1.2.8
« Last post by Arkadiusz_w on Today at 01:08:24 AM »The problem turns out that not everyone can spend more money on measuring sensors. Hence, for those who own the WS80 and WS90 Wittboy, I recommended buying the Ecowitt WS68, which turns out to be more stable when I tested it with a professional-grade wind gauge in the field for a longer period of time. I had a few reservations about the equipment, but it was generally closer to the truth than the WS80 and derivatives when it came to measuring wind speed.
The release of more firmware versions by Ecowitt for the WS80 and derivatives is due to, among other things, what I detected with the reference equipment and gave the information to Ecowitt with the evidence. Hence, they have been trying to fix the accuracy and stability of the Ecowitt hardware for many months. However, I doubt that with such a hardware layer, subsequent software versions will yield the expected results and it is not a waste of engineers' time and hardware resources. 40Khz transcoders are not very stable relative to 200Khz and are about 20-40 times cheaper than 200Khz transcoders used by reputable companies in the professional segment.
Personally, I think that going into ultrasonic technology was a mistake by Ecowitt, instead of focusing on improving the flaws in their rotary wind meters. It would have made sense if the hardware layer wasn't so cheap with sonic technology, it would have saved us time and wouldn't have required so many software updates, as not everyone has the time to do that and get on masts.
In some time we will check with the reference equipment what Ecowitt has improved in the WS80 and derivatives, but do not expect a breakthrough as long as such large savings on components are made. So we will most likely point out further flaws of Fine Offset in newer software versions for Ecowitt WS80 and derivatives. Perhaps someone will realize that this makes no sense, since Ecowitt doesn't even use professional ultrasonic anemometers in testing, to understand where they are making a mistake and wasting their human resources on fine-tuning a product of questionable accuracy. Not everything can be caught up with software when cheap components fail.
The release of more firmware versions by Ecowitt for the WS80 and derivatives is due to, among other things, what I detected with the reference equipment and gave the information to Ecowitt with the evidence. Hence, they have been trying to fix the accuracy and stability of the Ecowitt hardware for many months. However, I doubt that with such a hardware layer, subsequent software versions will yield the expected results and it is not a waste of engineers' time and hardware resources. 40Khz transcoders are not very stable relative to 200Khz and are about 20-40 times cheaper than 200Khz transcoders used by reputable companies in the professional segment.
Personally, I think that going into ultrasonic technology was a mistake by Ecowitt, instead of focusing on improving the flaws in their rotary wind meters. It would have made sense if the hardware layer wasn't so cheap with sonic technology, it would have saved us time and wouldn't have required so many software updates, as not everyone has the time to do that and get on masts.
In some time we will check with the reference equipment what Ecowitt has improved in the WS80 and derivatives, but do not expect a breakthrough as long as such large savings on components are made. So we will most likely point out further flaws of Fine Offset in newer software versions for Ecowitt WS80 and derivatives. Perhaps someone will realize that this makes no sense, since Ecowitt doesn't even use professional ultrasonic anemometers in testing, to understand where they are making a mistake and wasting their human resources on fine-tuning a product of questionable accuracy. Not everything can be caught up with software when cheap components fail.