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Low-Budget Home Weather Stations?

Posted by Cliff on from the who-needs-weathermen-anyways dept.

Toby Truman asks: "Working at the Fenwick Island Weather Station, I already have access to million-dollar meteorology equipment. However, some tinkerlusting college friends have been asking me about home weather stations, a subject I don't have a lot of experience with. Have any Slashdot users experimented with DIY weather stations, and if so, what do they recommend?"

4 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. wunderground.com by ghamerly · · Score: 3, Informative
    I've been interested in this since I found out about weather underground, which lets you feed your own weather information (gathered from your instruments) to their site for others to look at. They have thousands of people feeding them information. Besides this, they carry National Weather Service and they have a lot of other information that other sites don't seem to have. However, still being a graduate student, I gasped at the prices for a mid-range personal weather station (~$500, from my brief search).

    See wunderground's page on personal weather stations here .

  2. Brian C Lane's digitemp? by Ripper · · Score: 3, Informative

    Brian C Lane has Linux software available for measuring temperatures. It uses the Dallas Semiconductor 1-wire thermometer and includes directions for building & connecting it to the serial port. You can find it here.

  3. weatherstamp by cr@ckwhore · · Score: 3, Informative

    Check out www.weatherstamp.com.

    The weather stamp is a project kit based on the Basic Stamp microcontroller. If you're not familiar with the Basic Stamps, they're easy to program and very versatile. The weather station is good for a few measurements and only costs between $30 and $50.

    --
    Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
  4. Super-cheap DIY Thermometer by whatnotever · · Score: 3, Informative

    I recently hacked a temperature sensor out of an old <a href="http://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n6/gravis.j<nobr>p<wbr></wbr></nobr> g">Gravis joystick</a> and a broken diode. I had to calibrate it "by hand" (in the code to read from the joystick port), of course, but it seems to be accurate to within a degree (F) or so. So for the cost of one diode (on the order of one cent?) and one ancient joystick (free from a friend), I got myself a handy little temperature sensor. Oh, and with <a href="http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/<nobr>r<wbr></wbr></nobr> rdtool/">rrdtool</a>, I get nifty graphs, too!