Weather Outlook

If you frequently check the daily weather forecast, having your own weather station might be a good thing. However, professional devices are expensive, and they also mean that the amateur meteorologist is locked in to the display panels of the weather station vendor. As a rule, it is impossible to use the measured values in your own applications.

The cost driver is not typically the sensors in the weather stations, but the display modules. A DIY solution could handle the measurement-only tasks, but the sensor technology must be energy-saving and weatherproof. This is not easy to implement in a DIY project and adds to the overhead and costs. As an alternative, you could use the sensors of a professional weather station and draw on the data it provides for your project. In this article, I show you how to tap into the data stream of a weather station with a standard DVB-T USB stick, store the data in a database, and visualize it with Grafana [1].

Hardware

First of all, you need a sensor (Figure 1) suitable for your weather station project. Sensors like this are available for relatively little cash. I used a 5-in-1 outdoor sensor by Bresser [2] for around EUR80. The price and features can vary, and similar sensors with more features can be obtained at a lower price; it might be worth doing a little research. Bresser seems to restrict shipping to Continental Europe – the AcuRite Iris 06014 PRO+ [3] is a similar product that's available from Amazon.

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