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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  2172 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's the best weather app?

Hm. You have your own weather station? On the birth center, I presume?

What's it take to set up a weather station? My area seems particularly underserved, and with a west-facing view of Puget Sound, I think my location might provide people with a useful data point.

Is there an amateur weather station network I can SaaS-connect to? What's it cost to get set up? Hows it all work?





kleinbl00  ·  2172 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Birth center don't need a weather station. I've been tempted to foist it on my daughter's school, but only so I can add a pollution monitor with a clear conscience..

The short answer is "anything that will talk to CWOP." That means like just about any jackass LaCrosse or whatever. What you'll discover is that the easiest way to do shit is netatmo which literally sits there like a lump of shit and kind of gives you temperature and humidity.

The long answer is once you're online you start to give a shit about downtime and you start to care about accuracy and you start to feel smug and superior to the fact that yours is sited correctly which means it doesn't spike 30 degrees when the sun hits it like whoever the hell KCAPLAYA4 is and you feel smug that Wunderground is artificially shaping his data because we all know it isn't 118 degrees in Venice.

So you buy a Davis Vantage Pro 2 like everyone else, even though it's like $500, and you buy a Weatherlink IP because you're getting fucking sick of Weathercat taking a shit on you constantly and you upgrade your router from a Netgear to a Ubiquiti because fucking static IP means "don't switch my subnet to .100 simply because you don't know how to talk to Comcast you piece of shit" and before too long you've spent like $1000 so that you can tell it's raining without looking outside.

It's a disease.

Should you go down this road know that nobody pays retail. Shopping around is your friend.

user-inactivated  ·  2172 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This is what we are doing, after a fashion, for our observatory. We have a hook in that a guy at NOAA likes our club and is going to see what he can do for us.

Air Quality monitor, All-Sky camera, Weather Station, Internet Connect everything. In a spot in the country where there are no other weather reporting stations in 30 miles. We are also crying poverty and seeing about grants etc as we are "helping" the community.

kleinbl00  ·  2172 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Davis Vantage Pro all the way. They're what the LA County Coast Guard uses; if you browse actual weather stations, they're almost all Davis.

I'm willing to bet you could talk a RaspPi into writing a webpage with the weather data and the all-sky.

user-inactivated  ·  2172 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That is the only option on the table. We are in the "woe is us, we need money" phase right now and asking/begging for deals. The Web guy already is looking into the APIs etc.

goobster  ·  2171 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This is something I might consider for next year. It sounds juuuust geeky enough to keep me interested, and juuuuust altruistic enough for me to want to continue to provide the service once I get it working.

And at around $1k, I'd be willing to spend that on the system.

I have a friend with a bangin' weather station out in Indianola. Correlating our two monitoring systems from the northwest and southeast of Elliott Bay, could provide some interesting data...

Heck... weather98146.com is even available...

kleinbl00  ·  2171 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Weathercat is the mac equivalent of Weather Display. With Weathercat and a Vantage Pro 2 you'd have an identical setup to him, only on Mac vs. PC.

Here's a Weathercat page.

goobster  ·  2170 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Dang. $60 for all that?!? That's a screamin' deal...

Now if I could get the Vantage Pro2 for about $200.... =)

kleinbl00  ·  2170 days ago  ·  link  ·