Looking for weather station options

So, I’m looking for a weather station option for Vera. I started my home logic with WeatherUnderground, which stopped being supported, and wasn’t always terribly reliable. I’ve moved to Dark Sky, but a couple of weeks ago Apple bought them out, and we’ve got about 18 months of use before their API won’t work any further. I’d like to have more of a real time input that I can use for weather conditions, especially wind (anemometer) and lighting conditions (lux meter), so I know I’m going to need to purchase some sort of weather station, but I’m not sure which ones play nice with Vera. I’ve seen Netatmo, but it seems more concerned about inside conditions. What are people using?

Have same problem and I am going to do this…

I keep hearing good things about the Ambient brand, especially this model.

But I’m increasingly intrigued by new offerings from WeatherFlow which seem to be using some very interesting technology, and boast a wide network of home users.

Still, I don’t believe either product series has a turnkey integration with Vera (in the form of a plug-in or API). I’d imagine any WiFi-enabled device with active polling could integrate easily through SiteSensor and/or Reactor, however.

I’ve heard of one user employing an RFLink to transmit the data stream from his AcuRite weather station to Vera.

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I have since moved to a fibaro smart implant, so zwave native. So, now I have two inputs attached to the eltako board, that is able to manage sustained outputs automatically. I have a temp sensor attached to it and a luminosity sensor attached to a Fibaro fgs 222 to detect dark/light.

I’d probably go with weather flow now, but I love to hack things, so that was it.

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That Weather Flow looks pretty cool. Anybody using it on Vera yet? Seems like it should be able to. Works with Smarthings and HomeAssistant.

Here’s a full breakdown of WeatherFlow’s data API, which includes a RESTful interface you could use to pull data into SiteSensor.

Sample GET request with working test API Key:

https://swd.weatherflow.com/swd/rest/observations/?device_id=1110&api_key=20c70eae-e62f-4d3b-b3a4-8586e90f3ac8

It returns:

{"status":{"status_code":0,"status_message":"SUCCESS"},"device_id":1110,"type":"obs_air","source":"cache","summary":{"pressure_trend":"steady","strike_count_3h":0,"strike_last_dist":10,"strike_last_epoch":1582748896,"feels_like":34.0,"heat_index":34.0,"wind_chill":30.7},"obs":[[1586816806,1012.1,30.7,59,0,0,2.35,1]]}

For realtime data consumption, they also offer a UDP protocol that broadcasts JSON-encoded messages over port 50222 on the local network.

I can speak to the WS 2902A - great little model. Right out of the box it required zero ‘tuning’ to get accurate. I have it controlling my HVAC by way of the Ambient API + SiteSensor pulling hyperlocal data and then Reactor driving from there.

If you’re looking for a simple to setup and use system, we have a Netatmo weatherstation, with rain and wind sensors. There is an app for this to be integrated into Vera, and so far, is working well for us here.

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This is the cloud api, but there’s also a local one, based on raw sockets if I remember correctly.

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Not the greatest solution but I’m still using my Vantage Pro (Envoy) → Weewx → WUnderground ← SiteSensor ← various sensors for Reactor/PLEG.

If I get adventurous, I’ll start using Weewx and a local web server and use SiteSensor to pull data directly and remove WUnderground.

I’ve also used OpenWeatherMap (from Weewx) successfully.

I’ve got an Ambient WS-1401-IP, configured with the ObserverIP and a PM2.5 air quality sensor. I didn’t buy the display panel with it as I just integrate data from the weather station onto the tablet with Imperihome that I use as a status/control panel for my home automation. It’s a completely wireless and solar powered weather station with a supercapacitor to power it when there’s no sun.

The big feature that drew me to Ambient was the little ObserverIP box. It picks up the 915MHz wireless signals from the sensor package and allows access to the data over my home’s ethernet. It also automatically uploads data to Weather Underground and Ambient Weather networks.

I wrote some code to read weather data directly from it (it’s easy) so I don’t have to access out to the web to use any company’s API. I put the data from it into virtual sensor devices that I created on my Vera. The weather station data updates every 16 seconds, I read it into my Vera every 64.

I’ve been really pleased with it. No problems with it so far, coming up on two years.

There’s an Alexa skill for it, but you’ve got to have the patience to listen to her long readout of all the weather station’s data. :slight_smile:

It looks like Ambient doesn’t sell that particular system anymore, but they do have a couple of others that also support the Observer IP. They still sell the 1401’s sensor package separately, so you could still build the same system by purchasing individual components.

I’m expecting delivery of the new Tempest by WeatherFlow in the next few weeks. I’d love to see it connected to Vera.

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I use Ambient Weather (WS-2902) and access their (free) real-time API using Site Sensor. The downside is that it is almost entirely real-time and they don’t publish any historical data - even 24 hour hi/low data. It is just the data from your weather station, no more and no less. But it will certainly (therefore) give you wind and solar radiation in almost real-time. They don’t have five 9’s of reliability - closer to maybe 3 9’s - but I’ve been happy enough. Below is an example of a single data point.

[{“dateutc”:1587402600000,“winddir”:44,“windspeedmph”:0.2,“windgustmph”:1.1,“maxdailygust”:8.1,“tempf”:60.1,“hourlyrainin”:0,“dailyrainin”:0,“weeklyrainin”:0,“monthlyrainin”:0.67,“totalrainin”:41.31,“baromrelin”:30.24,“baromabsin”:24.76,“humidity”:29,“tempinf”:65.5,“humidityin”:41,“uv”:6,“solarradiation”:608.99,“feelsLike”:60.1,“dewPoint”:27.74,“feelsLikein”:65.5,“dewPointin”:41.2,“lastRain”:“2020-04-17T20:59:00.000Z”,“loc”:“ambient-prod-2020-17”,“date”:“2020-04-20T17:10:00.000Z”}]