Raspberry Pi And A Personal Weather Station

Ambient Weather WS-1090 and Raspberry PiI’ve had the Ambient Weather WS-1090 personal weather station for about a year and it’s worked well. It has a base station receiver that wirelessly receives the data from the sensors outside. The unit stores about 5 days worth of data but goes no further. It would be nice to be able to archive this data and also have real time data accessible from outside the home. It has a USB port and includes software but I’m not keen on keeping a PC on 24/7 just for that mundane task.

Enter the Raspberry Pi, a $35 credit-card sized computer that runs a variant of Debian Linux with HDMI, USB and Ethernet ports built in. A quick search revealed that Peter Mount has done all of the hard work already in a part 1 and part 2 tutorial. The tutorials are excellent, well written and unlike most Linux projects I try, there were no errors. I used a 4GB SD card that I had laying around and began with the Raspbian “wheezy” image from 2012-08-16. I expanded the partition to fill the card and enabled SSH so I could do the work from another machine.

I’m now pushing data every 5 minutes to Weather Underground were it automatically builds historical graphs of the weather from the PWS. I still need to get a proper solar radiation shield for the temperature sensor as it tends to read much warmer on sunny days.

5 thoughts on “Raspberry Pi And A Personal Weather Station

  1. Permalink  ⋅ Reply

    sirsurfer

    June 16, 2014 at 7:59am

    Hi mate,

    Just curious why your weather station is no longer reporting on Weather Underground for quite a while now?

    I’m in the process of setting up a configuration that is nearly identical to what you’ve used and would be curious what you learned in the process.

    I’ve installed Peter Mounts ready-made image in my Raspberry Pi and connected it to the weather station. The system boots but I’m a bit lost as to where to go next. Have only really used the Pi to muck around with and not yet done anything significant with it in terms of projects and am only mildly Linux-literate. Not much beyond using Ubuntu for a couple years and installing a Macbuntu theme on my Toshiba laptop.

    Any guidance would be most appreciated.

    Thanks!

    • Permalink  ⋅ Reply

      paulrickards

      June 16, 2014 at 5:31pm

      I actually discovered that it would hang after a period of a couple of days. I think it has something to do with the weather station hardware itself but I could be wrong. So I stopped using it after a couple of weeks of constant rebooting.

      I’ve actually had lots of weird unexplained problems with the Rapsberry Pi so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the cause. The Edimax ew-7811un WiFi controller also seems to “loose” connectivity every 10-15 minutes. No idea if all of this is related to power issues but I’m using a rather large power supply (5v @ 2A).

      Sorry, I know that’s not much help but I hope it maybe saves you some troubleshooting time.

  2. Permalink  ⋅ Reply

    sirsurfer

    June 30, 2014 at 1:07am

    Hi Paul,

    Thanks for the reply. Well, I discovered a few extra configuration items I had to add, the station went online, then mysteriously, a bit more than 24 hours later, it just stopped reporting to Weather Underground, for no reason that I could work out.

    I did all the usual stuff, manually resetting the reporting, testing the data streams, resetting the router, rebooting the Pi, etc, still no joy. Then, without me doing anything a day later it just started working again. It’s now been nearly a week and it’s humming along without a hitch. Fingers crossed!

    http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=IWESTERN313#history/s20140619/e20140627/mweek

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