Weather Station Using PC Monitor

weirdjim

weirdjim

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weirdjim
I'm looking to replace my Acuwrong POS weather station with something a little better. Something that doesn't read 108F when the good mercury thermometer in the same place reads 88F.

Anyway, I can find tons of them that talk to your wireless network and then an app to use your smart iDevice or Android phont/pad to see the weather station, but none of them will let me use my wireless PC monitor (the desk one or the lappy) as the readout.

Anybody come across one that will talk to my Windoze machines?

Jim
 
If you have a ham license, take a look at using an APRS Weather Station. Hook up the sensors that you want. Data from the sensors are converted to data packets and transmitted on 144.39 VHF to the APRS Ham Network. Data on the network is shared with the internet and mapped for display on a map: https://www.aprsdirect.com/center/39.17230,-77.18300/zoom/11/time/60 If you do not have a license, just take a weekend off to study and take the test. It is fairly easy now that Morse Code knowledge is no longer required.
 
Surely you can get one that has a normal web interface?

Google [remote weather station web browser] seems to turn up a few. Take your pick.
 
You can always connect your phone to a monitor (the IPhone has a little dongle) or use an Android TV.

My TempestWx station gives me wind direction, rain amount (both without mechanical parts), temperature, humidity, and lightning detection. It can be accessed with an app, a web page, or by asking Alexa "Tell Wetherflow weather." Of course the latter results in silly things like "Wind at 320 at 1.2 mph gusting to 2.3 mph."

It does come with a user API. I'm thinking about turning the thing into a surreptitious AWOS for our field.
 
kshaw said:
If you have a ham license, take a look at using an APRS Weather Station.
Click to expand...

You did see my sig, yes? ARX WX6RST? And it is the old kind, where you had to do 20 wpm.

Thanks, but the APRS system isn't exactly what I'm looking for. That and I would have to delegate one of my 2m transceivers to the operation. I've got an old Wouxun I could use, but then I'd have to gin up another 12 volt power supply, hang another antenna on an already well populated farm...

73 es cul

Jim
 
weirdjim said:
You did see my sig, yes? ARX WX6RST? And it is the old kind, where you had to do 20 wpm.

Thanks, but the APRS system isn't exactly what I'm looking for. That and I would have to delegate one of my 2m transceivers to the operation. I've got an old Wouxun I could use, but then I'd have to gin up another 12 volt power supply, hang another antenna on an already well populated farm...

73 es cul

Jim
Click to expand...

So, what's wrong with getting another radio and hanging another antenna? :)

N6TPT
 
flyingron said:
You can always connect your phone to a monitor (the IPhone has a little dongle) or use an Android TV.

My TempestWx station gives me wind direction, rain amount (both without mechanical parts), temperature, humidity, and lightning detection. It can be accessed with an app, a web page, or by asking Alexa "Tell Wetherflow weather." Of course the latter results in silly things like "Wind at 320 at 1.2 mph gusting to 2.3 mph."

It does come with a user API. I'm thinking about turning the thing into a surreptitious AWOS for our field.
Click to expand...

I have a Tempest Weather Station as well. It's cool and all and I like the API, but it doesn't detect 95% of our rain - it's too light (Seattle). It needs to "hear" the rain on the top and you can't even hear most of our rain if you're in a tent directly in it.
 
deonb said:
I have a Tempest Weather Station as well. It's cool and all and I like the API, but it doesn't detect 95% of our rain - it's too light (Seattle). It needs to "hear" the rain on the top and you can't even hear most of our rain if you're in a tent directly in it.
Click to expand...

I've got a Davis weather monitor that uses a mechanical rain collector on the roof. 20+ years and it hasn't skipped a beat. Recorded the 0.01 inches we got overnight. This summer hasn't been at record dry levels, but it's close.
 
I had an Acuwrong until a few days ago. It consistently read about 10 degrees (F) too high. I replaced it with an Ambient Weather WS-2902B in the same location and I'm getting much better results.
 
weirdjim said:
I'm looking to replace my Acuwrong POS weather station with something a little better. Something that doesn't read 108F when the good mercury thermometer in the same place reads 88F.

Anyway, I can find tons of them that talk to your wireless network and then an app to use your smart iDevice or Android phont/pad to see the weather station, but none of them will let me use my wireless PC monitor (the desk one or the lappy) as the readout.

Anybody come across one that will talk to my Windoze machines?

Jim
Click to expand...
As an alternative, would you consider something that reads a web page and displays the data from your local airport? A long time ago, I once wrote something in Excel VBA that read the barometric pressure stored from ATIS data. I used it to see if the barometer was rising or falling. @jesse created a cool web page (I think it is gone, now) where he displayed a lot more.

The advantage was I didn't need to buy equipment, and someone else maintained it. The disadvantages were that the airport is some miles from me, and I'm dependent on someone else maintaining a web page I could access. For barometric pressure, it was close enough for my needs.

If you are interested, I'll see if I can find the spreadsheet, see if it still works, and post it.
 
Ghery said:
So, what's wrong with getting another radio and hanging another antenna? :)

N6TPT
Click to expand...
Not the radio. I've got a half-dozen of them. Ginning up the 12 volt supply is a pain in the tush. And, for antennas, I'm getting just a LITTLE old in the tooth to climb up on a second-story roof four or five times a year to "just hang another antenna". The place looks like an agitated porcupine as it is. :cheers:
 
weirdjim said:
Not the radio. I've got a half-dozen of them. Ginning up the 12 volt supply is a pain in the tush. And, for antennas, I'm getting just a LITTLE old in the tooth to climb up on a second-story roof four or five times a year to "just hang another antenna". The place looks like an agitated porcupine as it is. :cheers:
Click to expand...

I can understand the getting old stuff. And I brought my wife home from an overnight in the hospital on Wednesday after she had her right hip replaced on Tuesday. Already had an artificial one in the left. As her mother said years ago, getting older isn't for sissies. And I'm sure her mother had some stories, she was an Army nurse during WWII and came ashore on Omaha Beach on D+1.

A 12 Volt supply should be easy, just grab a bigger one and plug it in. Climbing up to put up a new antenna is a different story, but there's nothing wrong with the place looking like an agitated porcupine. As long as the HOA and more importantly, my XYL don't mind I'd put up more, too.
 
I've not had any problems with the haptic sensor on the Tempest. It does register even light rain here.
 
donjohnston said:
I have an Ambient Weather setup. Works pretty good.
Click to expand...
Can the system be used -- that is, weather information displayed on, say, a tablet or desktop PC -- without using their "cloud hosted" stuff? My main complaint about, well, damn near everything now, is that you buy a very spendy little gadget that is very useful -- but that use is utterly dependent upon their "cloud" service and app, meaning you may or may not find it useful tomorrow or six months from now.

We have an old Acurite system now. There's a little display hanging in the kitchen. I bought their "weather bridge" that sends the data to their system, which apparently forwards to Weather Underground -- I dunno, I forget the details. I hacked up my DHCP server to re-route the packets to my own server, so I can dump the reports into a text file locally and use Splunk to extract what I want. But it's a pain in the ass to do and to maintain. What I want is something that has a local web UI or something, so I can see weather data here at home without having to go through someone else's maybe-there-maybe-not service. Accessible from anywhere in the world is nice, but not really a requirement.
 
While it's more convenient to use the Tempest's cloud repository for the data, I think they do have a local API. I've not tried to use it because there's enough other stuff involved in my project that the internet has to be there.
 
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