I ran LaCrosse Costco grade krappe for years.   Believe me, its not worth 
the bother, its horribly inaccurate, its highly subject to UV plastic rot 
such that the weather instruments start crumbling in 12 months,. and the 
radio protocols and stuff are *awful*.      the last one I had involved 
like 4 pieces that connected wireless (432MHz?  I forget) to each other.    
  

1) indoor display panel, which was USB to a computer.   
2) outdoor radio hub + temp/barometer/humidity
3) outdoor wind speed+direction
4) outdoor rain bucket

each of these pieces had alkaline batteries that needed at least annual 
replacement, and each time you replaced batteries, you had to put ALL those 
pieces together on a table, and go through this awful RF sync procedure 2-3 
times before it stuck.

I replaced that mess with an Accurite "5-in-1" which was  also Costco and 
also really cheap, and also really inacurate, and also had annoying quirks, 
but at least it was only two pieces, the instrument pod that you had to put 
up on a tall pole to get decent wind readings, and the indoor panel that 
was USB to the computer (I used a raspberry pi3 for this one).   It too is 
subject to UV plastic rot, but it lasts 2-3 years.  it has a solar charged 
odd AA batt (it wasn't NiCad or NiMH, but I forget what it actually was, 
not something normal) in the instrument head that lasts a couple years 
before going crusty enough to waste the whole weather station, without any 
warning.    the Accurite software protocols are ugly as sin, unoducmented, 
and had to be reverse engineered to work with WeeWX.    its REALLY slow 
reporting wind and rain, and the wind does NOT do 'gust' readings properly 
at ALL.

I just replaced it with a Weatherflow Tempest.    wow, night and day 
better.   Two pieces,   outdoor instrument,  that has a Lithium Titanium 
Oxide (LTO) battery that's lifetime, and is solar charged, and a little 
indoor radio hub that is USB Micro powerred, talks to the instrument via 
??? radio magic, and talks to your network via wifi.      The wonderful 
thing is, it broadcasts the complete instrument readings every minute as a 
UDP broadcast packet in a simple JSON format, and the wind readings update 
continously, and both the rain and wind gauges are 'haptic' and use NO 
MOVING PARTS.   Now, I've only had this online for a ocuple days, but I'm 
loving it.       I moved weewx from a dedicated raspberry pi to a 'jail' on 
my FreeNAS/TrueNAS home file server, copying the same mysql database I've 
been using for the last 5 years, the wind updates every *SECOND*.   I'm 
still waiting for some rain, but I'm expecting *WAY* better results from 
what I've seen and read.

Weatherflow just had a Black Friday or Cyber Monday or some suck deal on 
the Tempest, it was like $250.

oh.   you do need a smartphone for the initial configuration of the 
Tempest, but it was so easy, your grandma could do it, and yes, it does 
automatically report your weather to the weatherflow network, like here's 
mine:
https://tempestwx.com/station/63574/
(click on the temp to drill down to the 'card' view, then click on any card 
to get a time graph)

here's the same station on WeeWX "Seasons" 
https://freescruz.com/weewx/
(any historical data before about noon on December 1st was from the 
AccuCrap).


if I didn't get this Weatherflow, I probably would have gone down the Davis 
Instruments bunny trail, but thats 2-3X the cost for the instrument I'd 
want, and a way more complicated install.


-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"weewx-user" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit 
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/weewx-user/9b140238-1363-4b39-afeb-e40ef4125aa8n%40googlegroups.com.

Reply via email to