Weather Flow Weather Station

Mustang65 · Post by **Mustang65** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 9:08 am

As I am looking for a Weather Station to do everything and replace my various Arduino weather gathering units (1 wire Wind, Rain, temperature....), I saw Teken's "Weather Flow" real time review. I was impressed with the product, but from what I get from the information that I have reviewed so far, Weather Flow site included, is that the data is stored on their website and can be downloaded into local dB, also I believe I saw that there are different levels of a monthly membership subscriptions from $3 and up, to get/display your data.

My GOAL, looking forward, create an "ALL LOCAL" Home Automation/Energy Management/Weather Monitoring system that does not depend on the Internet for "My LOCAL site" information. Especially with a monthly subscription to download or view my data.

I am currently moving all my Home Automation/Energy Management and current weather monitoring systems to my local (stand alone) home network. Granted, if there are software/firmware updates, access will be granted manually.

As I mentioned in another thread, I have been the route of Internet located databases, annual subscriptions and companies/products that have gone south, (Honeywell weather station for one, X10....)

Don't get me wrong, the Weather Flow product sounds like a really nice system, but my hunt for the PERFECT weather station still continues.

Post by **Teken** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 9:19 am

If a person had nothing including programming skills and simply bought the WF system by default all data is stored in the cloud. Those who own a Brultech Dash Box will be able to retrieve all weather metrics locally via UDP broadcast which does not depend on the cloud just a solid WiFi / LAN connection.

The team is working toward incorporating all weather metrics for the WF system. The next goal is to integrate the WU API to allow as many users with different hardware to integrate into the DB.

Brultech and I are strong believers in Local First vs Cloud First!!

Cloud is only used to extend the capability of the DB for such features as IFTTT, Weather Map, Smart Energy Groups, DNS Port Forwarding, Brultech Remote Access, NTP, etc.

NOTE: There is no further cost for the WF System once purchased. What you're referencing is for other services they provide.

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Mustang65 · Post by **Mustang65** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 9:40 am

Thanks Teken

Post by **Teken** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 10:10 am

Mustang65 wrote:Thanks Teken

No worries just wanted the correct information out there for others. Also keep in mind BLE can be used for local access and data retrieval. I haven't seen anyone obtain metrics via BLE as of yet but that is also another method besides viewing without the need for a network connection or internet connectivity.

NOTE: The long term goal of WF is to integrate and connect to as many home automation controllers and cloud hosted services.

The ISY 994 Series Controller has already been short listed for future integration. As I have pushed hard to get this done by presenting a strong business plan to WF as to how it benefits them and everyone else.

There are two elements regarding the ISY Series Controller integration. One is through supporting Aeris / Weather PWS which allows the weather module to select our WF station as the target PWS.

Next is to offer a Node Server via Polyglot framework within the ISY Series Controller.

Employing both aspects offers every possible use case and tight integration with the ISY Series Controller.

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dbksearay · Post by **dbksearay** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 11:03 am

You may want to look at a product called MeteoBridge. It is also called WeatherBridge in the US sold by Ambient Weather. It allows you to select one of over 30 different weather stations and select where you want the weather data to be uploaded to. I currently have a Davis Vantage Pro2 station uploading to WU using Meteobridge.

Besides uploading to many of the common weather info services like WU, MeteoBridge provides some additional "push services", which can send weather information via email, twitter, HTTP requests, FTP uploads, mysql queries or by implementing a user defined script. All of these services can be triggered by certain alarm conditions, at a certain time of the day or in periodic intervals ranging from a few seconds to minutes or hours. Maybe you can use one of those services to accomplish what you want to do.

More details can be found at

http://meteobridge.com/wiki/index.php/Push_Services

Mustang65 · Post by **Mustang65** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 7:10 pm

Thank you dbksearay,I will look into it

Post by **ben** » Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:40 am

I just wanted to note that WU is currently in hiatus. I sent them an email last week asking for additional information on their licensing terms and am waiting for a reply.

I'll look into MeteoBridge and see if there's any way I can tap into that.

mwall · Post by **mwall** » Mon Jan 15, 2018 3:53 pm

if you are not averse to doing some software integration, you can build your own system. use brultech hardware for the energy monitoring. use pretty much any weather station hardware you like. feed all the data into emoncms, either directly or using MQTT. MQTT is great if you have hardware from different vendors, or if you are communicating over satellite or cell networks or sketchy wifi. use btmon to collect data from the gem/ecm1240 and feed it to emoncms. use weewx to collect the data from the weather hardware and other sensors such as tank depth, snow depth, tide level, solar radiation, etc or any of over 50 different types of weather station hardware. weewx will feed to emoncms and can also feed to many, many cloud services, if you want that. run it all on a raspberry pi for well under 100$US, or a 400$US x86_64 machine with big spinning disk if you are also feeding images from network cameras.

once the data are in emoncms, you can create your own dashboards, compare you energy consumption with outdoor temperatures, etc. or you can use the dashboards created by weewx and embed them into emoncms dashboards.

if you like living even closer to the edge, give influx a try for the back-end, and grafana for plotting and dashboards.

it is definitely not plug-and-play, but it is not too difficult either. the results are pretty powerful.

isn't it nice to have options?

mwall · Post by **mwall** » Mon Jan 15, 2018 3:59 pm

ben wrote:I just wanted to note that WU is currently in hiatus. I sent them an email last week asking for additional information on their licensing terms and am waiting for a reply.

I'll look into MeteoBridge and see if there's any way I can tap into that.

ben,

meteobridge is hardware that collects data from a few types of weather stations then optionally feeds the data to various on-line services. you can also purchase the meteobridge software and flash it to your own hardware (they support a couple of low-end routers, the raspberry pi, and maybe still generic x86_64 platforms). previous incarnations were known as meteoplug and meteohub.

i'm not sure how you would make the dashbox 'support' meteobridge. i would think you should make the dashbox accept weather data using the WU protocol. then anyone could send their own weather data into the dashbox, whether they use weewx, meteobridge, or even one of the internet-capable weather stations that sends direct to WU.

then add a module to the dashbox that pulls forecasts from NOAA or other weather service to display forecast info on the dashbox. you can look at the weewx-forecast extension to see how this is done generically, or copy parts of that code, if you like.

http://weewx.com

m

Post by **ben** » Tue Jan 16, 2018 11:13 am

mwall wrote:
ben wrote:I just wanted to note that WU is currently in hiatus. I sent them an email last week asking for additional information on their licensing terms and am waiting for a reply.

I'll look into MeteoBridge and see if there's any way I can tap into that.
ben,

meteobridge is hardware that collects data from a few types of weather stations then optionally feeds the data to various on-line services. you can also purchase the meteobridge software and flash it to your own hardware (they support a couple of low-end routers, the raspberry pi, and maybe still generic x86_64 platforms). previous incarnations were known as meteoplug and meteohub.

i'm not sure how you would make the dashbox 'support' meteobridge. i would think you should make the dashbox accept weather data using the WU protocol. then anyone could send their own weather data into the dashbox, whether they use weewx, meteobridge, or even one of the internet-capable weather stations that sends direct to WU.

then add a module to the dashbox that pulls forecasts from NOAA or other weather service to display forecast info on the dashbox. you can look at the weewx-forecast extension to see how this is done generically, or copy parts of that code, if you like.

http://weewx.com

m

I still haven't gotten a response from WU on their licensing terms. I don't think we can get away with just integrating it and having users enter their API key, I think we'd need a monthly subscription which gets a bit crazy (if we want to stay with the same minute granularity we support with other channels, we're looking at 1440 calls per DashBox per day).

Integrating systems like MeteoBridge and weewx does go with our philosophy of having a system not tethered to the internet. In terms of temperature, humidity, and pressure, it's just a matter of fetching the data as we already have a dedicated channel type and logger for that.

I saw MeteoBridge has a live data interface that can be polled, it sounds like push services are preferred but I don't think there's any harm in polling once every minute (or a user-defined interval greater than 1 minute).

http://wiki.meteobridge.com/wiki/index. ... n_Services

Does weewx have something similar?