Topic: Recommendations for upcoming equipment upgrade

[KD7GFL]

Currently I am using a Ambient WS-2902A and I am reporting to Ambient Weather, WU, CWOP, and Weathercloud.  (I plan to relocate and establish a new station with this equipment at my mother's house about 10 miles away.)

For my primary station, I am awaiting delivery of the following equipment from Ecowitt:
HP2551-Console
WS68
WH40
WH32-EP (To be mounted in a Davis 7714 Shield)
2XWH31
WH57
GW1000
I will also be ordering a Weather Bridge from Ambient so that I can continue to report to Ambient Weather and CWOP.

Mounting the hardware itself should not be an issue, but I am a little unsure regarding how to "seamlessly" transition as much as possible from one set of equipment to another.   

Will I lose all of my current station data for the year?

Any suggestions?  Things to do?  Things not to do?

[sdi89]

Hi,

I had a Davis Vantage Pro for 15+ yrs and recently I bought more or less the same components as you ordered.

My consideration from me little experience I have gained within the last month now is to install weewx on a raspberry or a NAS or any other virtual machine of your choice.

You can then configure the GW1000 in a way to send all the data it collects (from all sensors) to weewx. Weewx will then store all that data in a sql database. It also generates nice graphs and you can upload all the data from weewx to wunderground and many more weather services. And you will have your local weather website as well (that you can host on the same hardware where weewx is or anywhere else.

It is not to hard to get it up and running initially.
Give it a try. There is a big community that may help you as well for any questions you run into.

http://www.weewx.com/

There are also videos on youtube how to set up a personal weather station using weewx (in weewx you will have to configure the ecowitt driver to be it able to receive the loop data from the GW1000).

Good luck and enjoy your nice new gadgets !

[galfert]

Will I lose all of my current station data for the year?

Any suggestions?  Things to do?  Things not to do?

The only data you will lose is your current Ambientweather.net history. Well you wont really lose it because it will still be there, it just will not be integrated with your WeatherBridge data. The way that Ambientweather.net works is that each station data is separated by MAC address of the console that does the uploading. You'll be able in your Ambientweather.net account to select either station. After one year this is a mute point anyway because there is only 1 year of history kept on this service.

My suggestion for things to do, not do:
- Make sure that you only upload to any given online service with one device for every given ID. Meaning that you likely want to continue to upload to WU with your current ID. You can either keep the existing Ambient console uploading there or you can make the GW1000 be the one or you can make the WeatherBridge be the one....but just make sure that only one uploads to any given ID. If you would like to track how several consoles upload then you can just create additional WU IDs and then have each upload to their own ID. I suggest having the GW1000 be the one to upload to WU.
- If you set up alternative duplicate WU IDs for each console then I suggest you not put them all on top of each other. Don't put them on top of your neighbor's house either. Rather you should put them in a common area near your house...maybe in the middle of some forest, or at the park accross the street...you get that idea. This way they will be easier to select on Wundermap. Take note of what distance you need to be to show up at the proper zoom level as a separate station.
- If you decide to use the WeatherBridge (Meteobridge) to upload to WU then I suggest you turn on the check mark to enable "Alternative rain rate." this will make it so that rain rate is the same method as your other consoles. As there is Instantaneous rain rate and hourly rain rate and they depict different things. Alternative rain rate refers to instantaneous rain rate which is the method that all Ambient/Ecowitt/Fine Offset clones use to upload to WU. The hourly rain rate method is how Acurite stations upload to WU. Both methods graph totally different and they really are very different.
- Remember to disable AmbientCWOP.com if you decide to have the Meteobridge upload to CWOP...which I recommend you do.

[KD7GFL]

I think my game plan is to get all of the sensors installed, calibrated, and working as a standalone station for a few days before I changeover and begin using it as my primary reporting station.  I did order a Raspberry Pi 4 and am getting it set up to boot from a USB drive and then I will download other programs on it.