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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?"

7 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Doggy Weather by Perdo · · Score: 4, Funny

    If my dog is under the covers when I wake up in the morning, I wear a coat to work.

    If the dog is outside the covers, No need for the coat.

    If the dog is outside when I wake up, I consider taking the day off it's so nice.

    If the dog is under the covers and there is a wet spot at the foot of the bed, I'm not going to work because it must be snowing.

    --

    If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.

  2. 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 .

  3. Pine cone by heikkile · · Score: 4, Funny
    I suppose you already have a thermometer sitting outside your window. Hang a pine cone from it with a short string. Now you can see

    * Temperature (from the meter)
    * Clouds (look out through the window)
    * Wind speed (how fast the cone is dancing around)
    * Humidity (how far the cone has opened)
    * Snow (is there any on the cone)

    That is about as much as you can ever see through a window. If you need to know the wind direction, you have to measure it on top of your home, or somewhat away from any buildings. Same for a measurement of its speed.

    Of course, being on slashdot, the proper way is to let someone else do the measuring, and read it off over the net.

    --

    In Murphy We Turst

  4. 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.

  5. 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
  6. Davis Instruments by pease1 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Several years ago I picked up a Davis Instruments Weather Monitor II. Back then, there were only a couple of home weather stations on the market. The cost was about $500 with various sensors.

    Eight years later, it's done ok... the biggest problem is the wind sensor gets hit by lightning and it frys the station. The last time this happened, two years ago, I put off repairing it ($75) until I remount and properly ground the anemoneter (wind sensor). This will be one of my summer projects.

    The humidity sensor dies every now and then, but Davis almost always replaces it for free. The biggest problem with that is where I mounted it; too high for regular access - I have to borrow a ladder.

    I've pulled Cat5e to the attic and I'm about ready to deploy a "weather cam" pointed northeast out of an attic window so I can display realtime images. As the weather station comes back online, there are a number of windoze products out there that will log and create HTML pages with the data coming out of the WMII.

    The WMII has been a fun little toy...

    An underlying theme is the mounting of the sensors. Every location will be different, but can be a pain. The newer wireless sensors are very appealing, since you could mount them away from a house and not face some of the height/access problems you encounter on a roof top.

    If I were to start over, I'd look at the now much richer market place like this:

    • Available/tools/programs for logging, saving and making web pages for a station;
    • Wireless support;
    • Varity of sensors for the station;
    • Warrenties given even the sensors get beat up and have to repaired/replaced;
    • I'd favor products that have open, published data standards; Davis doesn't that I know of. Apparently third party products have reversed engineered the data stream.
    Pease 1

    You expect weather forecasts to be right?

  7. 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!