Weather station with ethernet

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raytaylor

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#237913 24-Jun-2018 09:03

Any weather experts here know of a reasonably priced weather station that does wind, temp and rainfall with an ethernet port. Wifi wont work in this situation but an ethernet connection to the internet is avaliable.

The ability for it to run on 12V too would be great.

Thanks in advance

Ray Taylor

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sbiddle

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#2043062 24-Jun-2018 09:29

Most of the higher end weather stations from the big brands such as La Crosse and Acurite all have Ethernet. As the units are all 433MHz wireless you normally have a standalone Ethernet bridge to connect them to your network.

It's only been in the past few year or so that you've seen them launch WiFi connectivity, simply because it's what most people want.

frankv

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#2043065 24-Jun-2018 09:40

Maybe use a Raspberry Pi or similar (probably an Arduino would do) to talk 433MHz to the weather station and then forward the data via Ethernet?

afe66

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#2043101 24-Jun-2018 11:25

Raspberry pi foundation rolled out pi based weather stations to UK schools. Last year? Might be worth a look.

raytaylor

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#2043164 24-Jun-2018 16:22

Thanks guys i think the raspberry pi would be a good fit. I'll go see if i can find some kits that include everything :-)

Ray Taylor

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neb

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#2043210 24-Jun-2018 17:34

raytaylor:
Any weather experts here know of a reasonably priced weather station that does wind, temp and rainfall with an ethernet port. Wifi wont work in this situation but an ethernet connection to the internet is avaliable.

The ability for it to run on 12V too would be great.

You can get wired weather stations, e.g. a Davis, but I wouldn't go for one, because you're taking a direct electrical connection from something that sits outside in an exposed, high-up position (in order to catch wind etc) to your internal network full of expensive computer equipment. Everything I've got that's outdoors and pokes up into the sky is airgapped via a wireless link.

Also, you don't really need to run the station off wired power, most of them will run for a year or more off batteries, longer if they have a solar panel. I replaced the 10F supercap on my Davis with two 35F ones and it's been running for some years now without any batteries.

afe66

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#2043290 24-Jun-2018 20:48

I'm I've got a Davis station, solar uv sensors.
Great device.
Wouldn't call it affordable unless your a weather junkie...

raytaylor

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#2043301 24-Jun-2018 21:23

Yeah my old man has a Davis weather station - to connect it to the internet it needs a serial cable and computer in between.

This one is going on a hill top where we have one of our solar transmitter sites, an ethernet based internet connection (therefore no wifi) and not much power to run a computer.

I have ordered a chinese weather station that uses solar/AA batteries and has a 433mhz to ethernet converter which will be installed inside the data cabinet and runs off 5v which i can convert down easily from 12v.

Am still on the lookout for a full rasberry kit to compare it with though as that seems like the ultimate solution.

Ray Taylor

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afe66

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#2043307 24-Jun-2018 21:52

Thats how I run my Davis

Wifi to the console then out via serial usb cable to NUC and upload to websites etc.

Not cheap but ?one way of uploading directly to internet without pc

https://www.davisnet.co.nz/products/communication/6622nz/

neb

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#2043309 24-Jun-2018 22:02

I use a Meteostick, which is rather cheaper since all you need to pay for is the sensor units. That plugs into a Meteohub which then feeds into remote weather sites and local phone apps.

meesham

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#2043311 24-Jun-2018 22:24

I have a cheap(ish) Fine Offset 1080 based weather station that transmits over 433Mhz. I used the base station that came with it for a little bit connecting it to my server using serial cable but found it to be unreliable, with the unit locking up every 2-3 weeks. I now use an old Raspberry Pi 1B with a Realtek RTL2832 USB DVB-T dongle and read the signals with the rtl_433 tool, I wrote a little script that publishes them to Weather Underground and a MQTT server for use in my Home Assistant setup (which then stores the data in InfluxDB for long term stats). I've found this to be very reliable, its uptime is currently 248 days - I think that was when my MQTT server went down and I wasn't error handling that properly. I paid about $120 for the weather station on eBay, $15 for the RTL2832 and the Raspberry Pi I had lying around.

neb

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#2043332 25-Jun-2018 01:07

meesham:
I have a cheap(ish) Fine Offset 1080 based weather station that transmits over 433Mhz.

I had one of those as well, but found that it was rather susceptible to anything else using that frequency, and once it lost contact with the base station had a great deal of difficulty in reestablishing the connection. It wasn't until I dragged out a spectrum analyser that I could see what the problem was, until then I thought I had a faulty weather station.

richms

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#2043333 25-Jun-2018 02:00

Its the base that loses sync with the outdoor thing on those. Its a one way broadcast and it seems that it only takes a couple of missed transmissions because of the 433MHz band being full of trash and the battery powered display gives up. They only power the reciever up at the correct time to get the transmission, the rest of the time it is off to save battery. Transmitting to an arduino I had about a 20% sucess rate of getting the data from the sensors.

Also, since the sensors all have about the same delay between transmissions, and the ID is "randomly" assigned when you put batteries in, they tend to talk over themselves too much even before you add in all the other stuff on the band. Basically the 1 way 433MHz protocol is a joke in urban areas. Might be fine on a hill in the middle of nowhere.

Richard rich.ms

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#2043334 25-Jun-2018 02:15

If you do work out a shopping list, @raytaylor, mind dropping a copy to me? It's something I'd love to look into for us, because it'd certainly be a helluvalot easier than relying on a mixture of calling some of our preferred locals and using the weather forecast :P

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

neb

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#2043335 25-Jun-2018 03:26

richms:
Its the base that loses sync with the outdoor thing on those. Its a one way broadcast and it seems that it only takes a couple of missed transmissions because of the 433MHz band being full of trash and the battery powered display gives up. They only power the reciever up at the correct time to get the transmission, the rest of the time it is off to save battery. Transmitting to an arduino I had about a 20% sucess rate of getting the data from the sensors.

Also, since the sensors all have about the same delay between transmissions, and the ID is "randomly" assigned when you put batteries in, they tend to talk over themselves too much even before you add in all the other stuff on the band. Basically the 1 way 433MHz protocol is a joke in urban areas. Might be fine on a hill in the middle of nowhere.

Yup. I had two devices on/near 432, one worked OK and the other, the Fine Offset, kept losing the connection. It was interesting seeing it on a spectrum analyzer, the first device was like a tidal wave of crap across the spectrum around 432MHz every 45s or so (imagine a bell-curve-like display that rose up out of the background noise and sunk back down again every 45s, I'm assuming DSSS), enough to disrupt the Fine Offset once the transmission intervals sync'd up enough.