I’ve always been fascinated with the weather. I can still remember the daily routine of charting the weather in kindergarten with meticulous scientific rigor: Each morning one pupil, on a rotation, would peer out a window and then mark down if it was sunny, or cloudy, or possibly raining. Growing up in New Hampshire I used to follow the extreme weather on Mount Washington. And, as a lover of metrics and data, I love the idea of contributing my own, hyper-local, data to the larger pool available for weather predicting and archiving.
Life is funny though, and when I finally saved up and bought a nice weather station for home we decided we needed to move. We ended up in an apartment for many years, which was great, but not the ideal situation for a hard-wired weather station installation. We are now back in a house to call our own, but life with a new baby is very busy and getting all that wiring done just isn’t at the top of my very long to-do list, sadly.
To tide me over, I ordered an Ecowitt WS90, also called the WittBoy. This device is not, I’m sure, as accurate as the Peet Brothers system I ordered all those years ago, but it is both wireless and solar powered. These two details solve the great majority of roadblocks between getting it setup.
I headed off to my local hardware store in hopes of finding what I needed to get this unit securely setup 6 or so feet off the ground and struck out. I instead went to one of the local chain hardware stores and found a long metal fence post I could hammer into the ground, and a pole I could attach to it to get the height I needed. I dropped the WS90 on top, tightened it down and confirmed it was both level and facing the right direction. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great start.
I already have some other sensors within this system, so my existing Ecowitt GW1100 saw the sensor array and begin to show my data. It collects temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, rain rates and rain totals, plus some information about how strong the Sun is. All of this data is visible on the little USB dongle’s web interface. This device can even upload it to a number of online services like Weather Underground, but that wasn’t enough for me.
Using that interface it’s also possible to create a local API on the unit which tools like WeeWx and Home Assistant are happy to read from. This is where things get a little more interesting for me. Not only do I now have hyper-local weather data, but I can use it to do other things. I’m able to feed this into Home Assistant for us in my dashboard, and I can use the data to help with automatons. Maybe you want to be notified if it’s raining so you can close any open windows. Or, perhaps you want to switch off the heat if you know the temps are above a certain point. Maybe something more practical like a light that reminds you, or your little ones, about how powerful the Sun is today to make sure they protect their skin? All of that possible.
Using Weewx I’ve created a dynamically updating web site that gets fresh weather data every 10 seconds. Does the temperature change significantly in 10 seconds? Not usually. But, the wind speed can, especially if there is a big gust of wind. It’s fun to see it update in (near) real time. I now take my live weather data and feed it out to a web server hosting that site publicly for other people to discover and make use of.
Weewx itself has a great community of developers and users so it’s easy to find plugins that allow you to send your data to a myriad of places. I was able to use a plugin to ping HealthChecks.io to let me know if the system is not working. And, it’s the Belchertown skin that allows for the integration to have live updates streamed to the system.
The data coming off the WS90 has been good so far. I hope the unit lasts long enough for me to get my other system wired up, and it would be great if it lasted a lot longer than that too. It has some measurements my other system doesn’t offer, and temperature and humidity aside, the ways it measures data is different from my other system. It will be interesting to see how they data differs between the two. Measuring wind with spinning cups is good, but it takes a certain amount of wind to get them spinning, plus they may not have time to accelerate to the full speed of a gust. The ultrasonic wind measuring system on the WS90 has no such inertia based issues.
Now that I know it’s working and reporting reasonable data, we’ve ordered a lightning strike detector as well as a little display we can hang. I love storing the data in a MariaDB database, and publishing a website for it, but I don’t want anyone who comes to visit to have to pull out their phone to see how hot it is.
Over time, I’ll post updates about how it’s working and what I’ve done to get to this stage. I think a more technical post about the Weewx server might be good both for my future self, and for others with an interest too.