[HN Gopher] Putting a dumb weather station on the internet
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Putting a dumb weather station on the internet
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 146 points
Date : 2025-10-07 19:11 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (colincogle.name)
(TXT) w3m dump (colincogle.name)
| brna-2 wrote:
| I was kinda expecting analogue tech and computer vision here. :D
| Nice work.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The very first cable weather "channel" was a large circular
| base at least 4' diameter (don't remember exact size, but big)
| that had various full size gauges on it. A camera was
| positioned to look down on the gauge under it. The whole table
| top rotated so that each gauge would continuously cycle under
| the camera. When you viewed the channel, you'd have to wait
| until the gauge you wanted to see rotated back around.
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| "If you want to support me, send me AA batteries" in the bot
| account profile made me chuckle.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Holy cow, cheap weather stations are encoding and decoding JSON?
| What a century.
| mungoman2 wrote:
| No, the tool rtl_433 repackages payload data in json for easier
| downstream consumption.
| dn3500 wrote:
| You might consider joining the Citizen Weather Observer Program.
| It's a great way to share your data with other station owners.
|
| http://www.wxqa.com/
|
| I had a station for a few years. The receiver had a usb interface
| so no software radio required. I used weewx to import the data. I
| even had a water temperature sensor off the end of my dock so I
| could see if the lake was warm enough to swim in.
| Havoc wrote:
| Uk weather office has a similar effort apparently - select
| registered sites and disable the official ones here:
|
| https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/
|
| Interesting to see that it gets many submissions from outside
| UK too
| phito wrote:
| Cool project but I would just have used a zigbee/wifi weather
| station, they are just as cheap.
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| I get the sense from the article that part of the fun was doing
| this via radio frequencies rather than having to deal with a
| network.
|
| > At this point, we've connected the Temu weather station to
| the Internet and the ham radio network. Anyone with an APRS-
| enabled radio, digipeater, receiver, or just a web browser can
| see what the temperature and humidity are at my house.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| links? the closest thing is 10x the price, some are more like
| $80, some $180
| pastel8739 wrote:
| Nearly all off the shelf weather station parts use 433Mhz or
| similar bands. It's likely that if you have any preexisting
| wireless temp sensors, etc that transmit to an indoor display,
| you can use those with a system like this. I also think that
| range and battery life is better for these simpler sensors.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| I want to do the reverse: I have a DIY esp32 "weather" station
| (temp/humidity but more importantly particle sensor) and I would
| love to share it via radio!
| Tepix wrote:
| I expected "putting something on the internet" to mean being to
| talk to a device directly, not taking its data and publishing it
| somewhere. Is it just me?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Yes.
| pastel8739 wrote:
| All this device ever does is publish results, so it's not clear
| what interacting directly would mean
| Tepix wrote:
| Mostly looking for vulnerabilities, probably
| netsharc wrote:
| Man, the interesting bits like decoding the radio signals to
| temperature isn't even in the article.
|
| Also, the temperature measurement is probably not accurate to 2
| decimal places, but the "toot" converts 7.2 C to 44.96 F.
| Someone needs to learn about significant digits.
| puterbonga wrote:
| Every time someone does a project like this, it exposes how
| trivial "IoT" really is once you strip away vendor lock in and
| buzzwords. A $3 sensor, a 10 line script, and a 40 year old ham
| protocol outperform half the commercial weather APIs out there.
| XorNot wrote:
| There's a magical world out there where Tuya leave us with the
| ability to OTA flash custom firmware of we have physical
| access, and then we can all just run ESPHome on private wifi
| networks.
| dylan604 wrote:
| And what recovery mechanisms do you have in place when the
| OTA flash goes wrong?
| yapyap wrote:
| same recovery mechanism as when the Crowdstrike OTA goes
| wrong
| kobalsky wrote:
| you can have 2 identical partitions on the ESP, the OTA
| flashes the inactive partition and signals to bootloader to
| attempt to boot it from there.
|
| the device is restarted, if the new firmware is working
| correctly you signal the update process that everything is
| all right and it sets the new partition as default.
|
| if the device doesn't boot correctly, or your sanity checks
| don't pass, either you or the watchdog restarts the device
| and it boot from the known-working partition.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I didn't ask what can you have. We _could_ have whatever
| safety processes we wanted with multiple levels of
| redundancy. However, that 's not what's available on COTS
| IoT devices though, so speculation does not help.
|
| Flashing the firmware of a cheap IoT device remotely OTA
| is not without risk.
| _flux wrote:
| Surely the basic flashing mechanisms used nowadays will
| first check checksum (and hopefully a device magic), and
| then you have a relatively short time window when it
| actually does the flashing after which it reboots? Even
| small devices nowadays seem to have the memory for it. So
| there is a window of failure, but it's not a very long
| one.
|
| Well, in addition to flashing the incorrect or buggy
| firmware.
| XorNot wrote:
| That actually is exactly how it works today with ESPHome
| flashed to the Tuya related chips. It's also the only way
| to do OTA: download into second partition, switch boot.
|
| But more widely: you just don't need to flash devices
| very often.
|
| Moreover OTA is just because that's something we used to
| be able to do till Tuya shutdown the cloud cutter hack
| which could do it (which also requires physical access -
| you have to reboot the device into flashing mode, you can
| still do it but you can't custom flash anymore OTA on
| most newer ones).
| alentred wrote:
| With respect, this misses some important constraints. Scale it
| to thousands of locations and target 99% SLA. Now you have a
| maintenance problem in remote physical places, requirements for
| hardware reliability, subcontractors to manage, need a reliable
| network connectivity, etc. You also need to collect and
| redistribute the data (API or whatever) - while this is a
| trivial problem today, still you incur costs for hosting,
| network, etc. While I actually agree with the sentiment, it is
| not just a $3 sensor either.
| seemaze wrote:
| To be generous, this solution 'outperforms' commercial weather
| APIs for exactly one hyperlocal geographic location, and
| underperforms on 99.999999% of the remaining locations that may
| also be experiencing weather of some sort.
| nunobrito wrote:
| JFY, there are thousands of weather stations reporting the
| temperature across the globe on the APRS network. Fairly easy
| to check temperatures for most places at zero cost and
| without internet.
| lgats wrote:
| https://aprs.fi/
| defraudbah wrote:
| this is one of the most fascinating and funniest articles i've
| read in a while
| digitalsushi wrote:
| my winter project is to create a container pod at home that
| remixes media, maybe adds in some old or joke tv commercials
| between shows, and most importantly, shows the weather and the
| route to work at 7am. i think everything exists to do this, but
| it might take a few weeks to cobble together.
| auspiv wrote:
| For even more retro points, have the UI presented by
| WeatherStar! https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com/
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Slightly tangential, my hope is that the Blitzortung project
| picks up momentum.
|
| > Blitzortung.org and Lightningmaps.org are world-wide non-
| commercial low-cost community-based lightning detection and
| lightning location networks. They provide free real time
| lightning maps for a lot of count
|
| [docs of the projects](https://docs.lightningmaps.org)
|
| [real-time lightening map](https://map.blitzortung.org)
| xd1936 wrote:
| I was very grateful to the author for `aprs-weather-submit` while
| building cwop.rest. Great post.
| Havoc wrote:
| Been meaning to DIY a weather solution too...just need to figure
| out how to power it on balcony (no power). Thinking perhaps via
| the new sodium batteries & explore that too while at it.
| seemaze wrote:
| If you live in a moderately dense area or know a neighbor who
| also has a weather station, you might try the command line
| utility rtl_433[0] mentioned in the article with an SDR dongle
| to pick up existing broadcasts in your area. I pick up three
| different stations consistently!
|
| [0]https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
| Havoc wrote:
| I did try it a while back and only picked up industrial
| fridges...presumably a restaurant...apparently those run on
| same tech
|
| Moving soon though so should give it another try then
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| This reminds me...
|
| My parents gave me a smart weather station for Christmas a few
| years ago. I never even took it out of the box. I know it exposes
| a web server so I can view a fancy UI in my browser...
|
| I should take it out of the box and run a pentest on it. I
| imagine it's pretty insecure. The developers of these types of
| things often don't consider security.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| What's the best homebrew weather station out there? Currently
| I've got my eye on https://3dpaws.comet.ucar.edu/ but interested
| to hear about others.
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(page generated 2025-10-13 23:01 UTC)