Topic: Ecowitt and weewx: is gateway needed, or continue with SDR?

[AC3]

I have been running weewx on a Pi for quite a few years, capturing SDR data from my Acurite Atlas (and previously Ambient) sensor array. The Atlas is showing it's age: plastic getting brittle, aspirating fan on its way out and probably wouldn't survive another harsh winter.

I was looking at going the Ecowitt route for replacing the Atlas. I've been reading the threads here on pros and cons of fully integrated arrays (WS90) vs separate (WS80/40 & WN32), the latter seems more practical for my property as I can get the temp sensor into the shade (always been a problem with the Atlas as the aspiration fan can't keep up with the temp rise in full sun), and keep the anemometer up high.

My question is if an Ecowitt gateway is still needed if I plan on continuing with weewx / SDR? I'm sure it might be easier to setup for weewx to parse the gateway rather than me mapping each sensor individually, but can weewx / SDR replace the need for a gateway? I'm trying to limit how many little gateways / IoT devices I have on my network (lol, already quite a few), so if the Pi & SDR is up to the task, I'd happily go that route.

If I do go with SDR - would it be possible for rtl_433 to parse multiple frequency bands at the same time:  eg, 915MHz for Ecowitt and 433MHz for some Acurite temp sensors I have in my fridge / chest freezer, or is it one or the other?
Thanks.

[R.Sidetrack]

I have Ecowitt devices, but use their gateways, so no SDR for me. But this relevant thread shows that you can use SDR if you want: https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=46108.0

[jpochmara]

I use an SDR dongle to to capture data from my Ecowitt sensors ( WS90, WH40, WH32BP, etc) and it works.  It takes some tinkering to get it going.  The SDR driver for weewx is not under development anymore, and does not have support for all of Ecowitt sensors.  Does not come with support for the WS90,  you will have to add that support yourself.
I am in the process of moving away from the SDR drive to the MQTT driver, with rtl_433 sending it's data out via MQTT.  Then you have access to all of the data from rtl_433 without having to update a SDR driver all the time.

The Ecowitt gateway is more of a plug and play, it just works.

The only "advantage"  the SDR method has over the Ecowitt gateway is that you are not limited on how many/type of sensors you can have.  The Ecowitt gateways support one WS90 array, whereas with SDR you can read data from any number of WS90s.  You can read about the sensor mix supported by Ecowitt gateways here:

https://meshka.eu/Ecowitt/dokuwiki/doku.php

And then you have to decide if that is really and issue for you or not,  my guess it is not.

[rrajarajan]

It's a time vs money/effort question. I have a GW3000 and it works right out of the box with no tinkering. Pairing with the sensors and sending data to Weewx was a no brainer.

So my recommendation is the GW for sheer ease.

[mcrossley]

Plus the gateway gives you a barometric pressure sensor (and another temp/hum). And the GW3000 gives you historic data on the SD card should you need it to fill in any gaps.

[AC3]

I should have specified that I am also running a BME280 on the Pi, so I am getting pressure and the indoor metrics.

Thanks for the replies, I guess it does come down to how much tinkering I don't mind doing vs simplicity of the GW. And the GW is there with no down time while I putter around with the Pi/SDR time permitting (which isn't often these days). Was a bit of a pain for me to move from Weewx 4 to 5 getting all the drivers and skins to play nice, so it sounds like a GW might be the least painful way to get up and running.

@jpochmara : exactly, if the driver development is on hiatus or abandoned, easy to hit a brick wall with sensors support. Thanks for that info re: rtl_433 & MQTT
 

[vinceskahan]

If folks have additions to the weewx SDR stuff, they should post their patches or pointers to them in the weewx-user google group so others can benefit from them.  A lot of folks have forks or clones of the SDR stuff and undoubtedly somebody would add new things to the SDR stuff, given working patches.  I know there's one fellow in AU looking at some additions currently.

Ecowitt gateway dev isn't dead, it's just moving to other devs, so it's alive too.  Patching in a new device type isn't that big a deal.  I provided patches for WS85 when that (piece of junk) appeared on the market.  Not a big deal to do at all.

I'd go Ecowitt gateway 100% of the time over the complexity of SDR and needing a dongle and antenna etc.  The gateway driver is rock solid and trivial to set up.  Just stick the gateway on a separate IoT VLAN and wifi if you can, since it (unfortunately) needs Internet connectivity to the vendor in China to work.  It's hard to find things that don't phone home to the vendor these days.  That might be the only reason I'd even think of SDR as a solution.

(yes - you can apparently fake the China-side the gateway relies on with 'more' complexity on your network, but I just VLAN'd it off since I had other IoT stuff already)