Around where I live, its hard to get accurate weather info. I live many miles away from the closest public weather station. So about a year ago I set up a basic local weather station. I would see my rainfall totals, temperature and other stats were different from what was reported far away. I think having a local weather station helps me better understand what is going on in my neck of the woods.
But this year I upgraded to a better weather station, it has more features. Including a way to log the weather data locally. So I can check at any time the current weather conditions.
Previous to this Tempest Weather System, I had an Ambient weather station and dashboard. I was unable to make use of a logging machine with this. So I had to upgrade to something a little nicer.
Finding a good place to mount it I pick one of my poles I did not end up using for the solar panels. I will probably add a pole mount and get it up higher but this is a good start.
All attached and facing north it should be ready to start broadcasting weather data back to my home.
Should be interesting to see how this holds up, it has an internal battery that recharges by solar. Though I hear in a few years I may need to replace the battery, not the most simple job but thats awhile from now so I will worry about that when it happens.
The weather station pairs with a wifi bridge that then broadcasts the collected data to a virtual machine I have running Home Assistant. This runs on a mini-pc and seems to work okay for now. I may need a better host machine if I collect more metrics. This opens the door to lots of cool IOT devices, but for now it seems to run okay on a little mini PC on a virtual machine.
This app logs all the data and puts it in graphs and such. I could just use their own app on the Play store, but I would rather have my own local server than deal with their app.
The main page we can see all the current stats.. It has lots of sensors, will be interesting to see them through out the seasons.
By clicking on the data points it brings up graphs that shows the data collected over time.
Certain charts such as wind direction will look better with some tweaking soon. So now I just get bearing, but eventually I hope to add more of an indicator to show direction.
Placed by the solar panels, I should have a good idea of the brightness of the sun. My last weather station was a few hundred feet from them. So this new one should hopefully give me some good stats just on the sun alone.
So next I plan on tweaking the dashboard to show the data better. But I am really happy now so be able to look back at temperatures and see how cold it got in the morning. And looking forward to some storms coming through to test that lightning sensor. Will be interesting to get a map function working hopefully to show the data better when strikes happen.
