Weather Station Hardware > Barani Design Weather Stations and Accessories
Update interval is too restrictive.
Jorginho:
I know this is not a real question, more a remark and a viewpoint. But we are here to help also, not just to ask.
When I look at Barani, a few things come to mind:
- It is for a reason they compare to Davis Vantage Pro2 and not truly professional station. So I guess this is a target market for them.
- Weatherunderground provides rapidfire. for a reason.
- Sigfox (I did not look into Lorawan nor NB Iot or what it is called) offers a max of 140 messages/datatrafers per day if I get that correct.
Now the last point means a few things. First of all suppose Barani is taking that as basis and it certainly seems so given their 5/hour datatransfer. I mean; 24 x 5 is 120 messages per day and 6 times means you cross that line.
Another thing happens: just sending so few messages means your transmitters have a very long off time, so you save a lot of power there I guess. So you can do with pretty pedestrian batterypower...Which is huge advantage.
Sure enough it is how the WMO works...Every 10 minutes an update with in it all the extrema, the averages etc.
But I don't think it is how weatherhobbyists work. I think a pretty good analogue are mobilephones versus DSLr/mirrorless cams....We have computational tech on the phones but they cannot come close to DSLR/mirrorless. You cannot get the IQ out of a pinhole lens versus a true lens 50 times the size. Impossible. Look at the marketshare of those cams: plummeting and plummeting. There is one reason for this: convenience and the wish many users have. They want their pics fast and share them fast.
And weatherbuffs are no different: they want good data for sure, but they too want it fast preferably live. It is where rapidfire comes into play. I don't think Barani offers anything like that kind of data, and if I am wrong all of what I wrote can be thrown into the bin. But if I am right, they need to tackle it. Not only does it mean a much higher rate of data transmission, but this in tiself means you need to be extremely efficient with the batteries you have on board.
So in my view and surely for me personally this needs to be adressed in the future. I can see myself using a Barani system for myself and use wow for it. While I also keep my Davis for Wunderground etc. But others who can not or do not want to buy/maintain two full fledged setups need to chose. I think many would go for the Davis. The data quality, like image quality on phones, might be worse but getting the data is so much faster that it probably is a decider for 80% of the usergroup I think.
I wonder if I am correct about the maximum of 5 times/hour datatransmission and I also am interested how others feel about all of this.
johnd:
--- Quote from: Jorginho on August 22, 2020, 04:34:02 PM ---I wonder if I am correct about the maximum of 5 times/hour data transmission and I also am interested how others feel about all of this.
--- End quote ---
I'm no expert but AIUI, that sort of limitation is correct. SigFox in particular seems to have the lowest bandwidth of any of these LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Networks) technologies - it's inherent in how SigFox works. You maybe able to get somewhat faster update rates but it's always going to be a tradeoff between the message size and its frequency.
More generally: Leaving the cheap Ecowitt-type stations to one side, the main market for weather stations is not hobbyists (ie 'weather buffs'), it is more general users especially in farming and horticulture, but a wide range of other applications too such as education, research (not weather research for which high-end stations would be used, but eg ecological studies where a background weather record is important), noise monitoring, weather-dependent outdoor activity clubs etc. Very few of these users need or want very frequent data updates. Offhand I can't think of one such application where WU Rapidfire has ever been requested for instance.
But the potentially big market - and the one that I'm guessing Barani may be aiming at - is agriculture and here an update every 10 minutes is more than enough.
Jorginho:
I completely forgot that Davis is seriously tapping into these markets and indeed there 10 minutes updates are usefull too.
Otoh:
- This is a forum that seems to be squarely aimed at weatherbuffs and we have a reseller (I guess?) mauro who is pretty avid in answering questions and explaining things.
- Weatherunderground is currently the only such service supported by Barani which seems to be squarely aimed at hobbyists.
- W ehave Mauro who says a complete revamped interface between the weatherstation and wunderground, wow etc is now in the works I think in no small part because of what hobbyists want.
Regardless: if they want us as group of customers, I think 10 minutes does not suffice. Sure there are those using ecowitt, fine-offset, netatmo users who will probably not buy these. But there seems to be a pretty large proportion of Davis users and these in general ar eperfectly capable of buying these stations.
I wonder if there are other networks that can get us live data or they can come up with version that works more like a Davis (so a sending and receiving unit).
johnd:
--- Quote from: Jorginho on August 23, 2020, 06:37:01 AM ---- This is a forum that seems to be squarely aimed at weatherbuffs and we have a reseller (I guess?) mauro who is pretty avid in answering questions and explaining things.
--- End quote ---
Yes, but you were asking about Sigfox (amongst other things I know). These LPWAN technologies are not for users who want very rapid data updates - I think you need to stick with traditional broadband Internet technologies for that.
There are software technologies that support rapid updates (over broadband) like MQTT, which are available on several local data devices including WiFi Logger and some of the weather programs like CumulusMX (IIRC). The problem is that the popular weather platforms do not currently accept data via MQTT. It's not necessarily difficult to do, but it needs a decision by the platform how to handle data like this. For example, very rapid data probably does not need to be stored by the platform, so you end up with two kinds of data: real-time data (displayed but not stored) and archive/summary data uploaded eg every 5 minutes or whatever that is stored. It's no coincidence that this is how the Davis LOOP and archive data formats work.
Addendum: It's an interesting problem actually. Ideally, you don't want an online weather platform that belongs to a specific manufacturer - for the obvious reason that they are probably not going to welcome data uploads from from different makes of station. But developing and maintaining a good weather platform costs quite a chunk of money and so realistically it cannot be free (or at least fully free, ie it could be a freemium model like weatherlink.com). We have talked in the past about whether it might be possible to do this on an open-source basis, ie with developers contributing their time for free, though there would obviously still be some commercial costs for hosting the platform. But I'm not aware that any progress has been made on sucha project.
mauro63:
--- Quote from: Jorginho on August 23, 2020, 06:37:01 AM ---I completely forgot that Davis is seriously tapping into these markets and indeed there 10 minutes updates are usefull too.
Otoh:
- This is a forum that seems to be squarely aimed at weatherbuffs and we have a reseller (I guess?) mauro who is pretty avid in answering questions and explaining things.
- Weatherunderground is currently the only such service supported by Barani which seems to be squarely aimed at hobbyists.
- W ehave Mauro who says a complete revamped interface between the weatherstation and wunderground, wow etc is now in the works I think in no small part because of what hobbyists want.
Regardless: if they want us as group of customers, I think 10 minutes does not suffice. Sure there are those using ecowitt, fine-offset, netatmo users who will probably not buy these. But there seems to be a pretty large proportion of Davis users and these in general ar eperfectly capable of buying these stations.
I wonder if there are other networks that can get us live data or they can come up with version that works more like a Davis (so a sending and receiving unit).
--- End quote ---
- This is a forum that seems to be squarely aimed at weatherbuffs and we have a reseller (I guess?) mauro who is pretty avid in answering questions and explaining things.
just a small clarification on this point
I am not a Barani reseller, I have no commercial interest with this company, I like their products and their philosophy and for about 3 years we have had a form of collaboration, totally free of charge, in which I try to be the point of contact between the company and the consumer
this is a very important aspect, few companies are able to listen to the needs of users, collect their criticisms, their suggestions and treasure them to improve their products
that's all
Mauro
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version