Topic: 2902a and gw1000- what would I use Meteobridge for?

[AnthonyB]

Good Morning! I’ve been slowly getting more and more in to weather observation and am trying to keep up with all the incredible info in these forums.  My GW1000 will arrive today. At the price, and based on all the mentions here, I just couldn’t resist. I currently have a 2902-a station, and having the ability to add the lightning detector and an indoor sensor for humidity to place with some cigars seemed awesome.

Now I’ve started reading through threads about mesobridge. I love the idea of having more control over my outputs, but I’m not sure the cost justifies it for my usage. I currently am reporting to ambient weather, WU, weathercloud, and CWOP through ambientcwop. I would love to have a personal weather website, but have zero to no knowledge in building one or desire to pay hosting fees for one.

With all that said, is there any advantage for me to go with the mesobridge based on what I’ve shared? I guess I could report to a couple more sites but I don’t know if that would justify the cost either. Are there other advantages I am missing or is my weather nerd status just not high enough yet to appreciate it?

[kenthcwx]

Good Morning! I’ve been slowly getting more and more in to weather observation and am trying to keep up with all the incredible info in these forums.  My GW1000 will arrive today. At the price, and based on all the mentions here, I just couldn’t resist. I currently have a 2902-a station, and having the ability to add the lightning detector and an indoor sensor for humidity to place with some cigars seemed awesome.

Now I’ve started reading through threads about mesobridge. I love the idea of having more control over my outputs, but I’m not sure the cost justifies it for my usage. I currently am reporting to ambient weather, WU, weathercloud, and CWOP through ambientcwop. I would love to have a personal weather website, but have zero to no knowledge in building one or desire to pay hosting fees for one.

With all that said, is there any advantage for me to go with the mesobridge based on what I’ve shared? I guess I could report to a couple more sites but I don’t know if that would justify the cost either. Are there other advantages I am missing or is my weather nerd status just not high enough yet to appreciate it?

Regarding the website side of it, I made my own one using a free server & PWS Dashboard. You can use http://www.uhostall.com/ for a free server & you just have to follow the instructions on the PWS Dashboard site for it. There is a Weather Watch forum with plenty of help if you get stuck. You can use the Wunderground API or Ecowitt for it so no need to run a constant computer or anything. Personally, if you're happy with what you are uploading to then I don't think there is any need for you to get it. It's your call though.

[WA4OPQ]

I'm not familiar with mesobridge and cannot find it with Google.
Did you mean Meteobridge?

[AnthonyB]

I did mean Meteobridge.. sorry!

[galfert]

The Meteobridge opens up a bunch of new opportunities not just with additional online services. So yes there is a bunch more places to upload to. That is one benefit. The other benefit is one centralized place to upload everywhere rather as you have now where the GW1000 uploads to some places and the WS-2902 uploads to other places, and then you have some forwarding going on where one service sends to another. The Meteobridge can upload everywhere directly except not to Ecowitt.net. And yes the Meteobridge can upload to Ambientweather.net which is freekin incredible, as long as you either get the Meteobridge directly from Ambient (called a WeatherBridge) or you add the Ambient $100 license to any other Meteobridge. The Ambient version already comes with this license. The other thing the Meteobridge will do is upload to CWOP directly and thus more reliably than how you are now via Ambientweather.net which then goes to AmbientCWOP.com to then finally get to CWOP. Other benefits are ease of setting up your own website with a multitude of various templates. Yes some templates have adopted pulling data from Ambientweather.net or from WU, but it all just works better and is more "live" if it was done directly like from the Meteobridge. And there are some templates that don't work off other services so you have to do it with your own device like the Meteobridge or other software. The Meteobridge also has a bunch of custom configurations and alerts that you can program, it can email you or send to Twitter. The other thing it can do is save all your data to a mySQL database. The Meteobridge is very reliable. It has a Live Data page where you can quickly check the status of all the services you upload to. The Meteobridge also has a very nice webcam upload that can be used by any URL webcam service including adding data overlay of weather data on your webcam feed. The Meteobridge has a really nice easy to set up remote access that does not require any firewall ports to be opened and so you can manage it all remotely. I'm probably missing some other features.... It just does a lot.

[WA4OPQ]

I'll second everything Galfert says.  I have three of them.

One thing not mentioned is that it has an extremely powerful scripting language that allows complex comparisons and if/then/fi conditional strings. I use some incredibly long strings to craft messages to Twitter. Nothing else can do this.

[galfert]

Yes the scripting is neat! And because of the powerful scripting you can use it to tie in to home automation.

I used the scripting language to devise a way to be one of the first to upload to Windy.com when they first launched the service for your own weather station data upload. It took some time till the Meteobridge and other software caught up and added the capability natively.

[AnthonyB]

Wow, that is way more than I was aware of and all sounds very cool. Also sounds like a steep learning curve for me. Are there any guides/resources out there to get started that I can read up on?

[galfert]

The Meteobridge domain has a lot of information.

You can also play around with basic functions with this cloud simulator to give you an idea how easy it is to use.
http://config.meteobridge.com/

This simulator is a bit dated running version 3.8 as the latest real version is 4.3 so a lot of features are missing. But you'll get the idea and see that it is easy.