i’m just curious, which kind of outside weather station (manufacturer) are you using that is capable to work with OH2?
Is there any good product under 200 EUR (available in Germany) that even includes air pressure, humidity, wind gauge and even rain gauge besides the temperature? What about the power supply? I read about some that have a small solar panel? Does this work?
How do you connect the station then? By WiFi or radio? Are there any OH bindings available for your station?
What should I consider in my decision before buying one?
I do not have a commercial one, but in general I can say that many weatherstations use the Oregon Scientific protocol that can work with the RFXCOMM binding in OH.
Whether in the end that is the best solution for you I do not know. Good luck
I’m using Netatmo. The Starter kit includes an indoor and an outdoor module for less than 200,-€. You can extend your system with a rain and a wind gauge as well as more additional indoor modules for different rooms. It measures all data you need plus some additional ones like noise. It’s connected to WIFI, but uses a cloud based communication on the server of the manufacturer. There is a special binding for OH2. The main indoor module has a fixed power supply. Each other module uses batteries. I own them for half a year now and the battery levels drops to nearly 75%. I expect them to have a lifetime of one and a half year. One disadvantage is, that it delivers the measurements only every ten minutes. You might consider that if you need in time data.
If you have any other question don’t hesitate to ask.
I don’t live in Germany, so not sure if this station is available there, but I’m pretty happy with my AmbientWeather WS 1400IP. It has the solar panel to recharge the outdoor station, comes with temp, humidity, pressure, wind speed/direction, rainfall, indoor temp + humidity, around $160.00 here.
Wrote my own binding which gets the data off the IP bridge.
Thank you! Even if this is at the end a bit more expensive than I would like to spend (including rain + wind gauge), I’ll consider this because I read that it’s possible to use it with Amazon Alexa! This makes it interesting.
So, indeed I’ve the following questions:
I don’t see there is any basis station available / required (like the Bridge for Philips Hue), right? So how all sensors are connected (especially the outdoor stuff)? Really just by WiFi, not somehow radio controlled? I see an issue here because I’ve to amplify the signal strength of my WiFi network to reach the place in the garden where I want to install the wind + rain gauges. Amplifying the signal stength means more radiation inside the apartment. Especially if I want to track wind + rain at night as well, where I currently decrease the signal strength of my WiFi to less then 25%.
Another question, I guess the cloud account is then always required, right? Does this result in additional costs at a certain point? And therefore, even the OH2 binding requires access to the Netatmo cloud account, am I correct?
the same in germany is the WH2600 or WH2601
I use that one … it has everything requested.
different brands sell it… its all the same.
I just installed it THIS weekend… So I just put all the values on a temp sitemap …
not pretty or done anything with it yet… but it works pretty good and you can have a look at ALL possible values
The main indoor module is the only device connected to your WiFi. It acts as a “bridge” for the other modules.
Those are connected over radio to your main indoor module.
They have an acceptable range for a connection to the indoor module.
I’ll post my OHAB binding, if you’d like, it just scrapes it off the local web page. Works pretty well, and easy to configure the polling frequency for local DB storage.
Your outside temp reminded me why I moved away from Germany
Cheers,
-Th
EDIT: Your indoor battery shows already low, even tho you’re saying yu just installed it. Don’t worry, seems like it’s always showing that - mine did for the last 2 years and it still works…
I Grab it from the local Page with http Binding and regex.
The Indoor Module Shows Low because i use eneloops and it is designed for non rechargeable batts (1,2 vs 1,5 volts)
If you created a Binding for that Would be even better
A cloud account is always required, yes. Obviously you never know what will happen, but it has been free at least until now. As a bonus, all data that is gathered is available in the cloud.
I am using Netatmo as well, very pleased with it. Do you know if it is possible to increase the update rate over the api, or keep the socket open until it changes it value? I have been thinking about making a battery adapter for the outdoor module, because it drains battery, so get good quality batteries or rechargeable ones.
Thanks for sharing!
Screenshot looks really great, so there is really a whole bunch of values available
However, could you please give some thoughts about how the weather station is assembled and of which material it is? What’s your current overall impression?
I just have as reference the images on an Amazon sellers page, it looks like the outdoor station is made of white plastic? Even the wind gauge. Do you know whether there is at least the ball-bearing inside is of higher quality (like steel) - or even plastic, too? What do you think: Will the outside part will look like today in a year from now - once all seasons are gone through? Or will it look like a bit rotted or scruffy like we all know it from this white plastic outdoor chairs?
Best way would be to build up your own weather station with arduino/esp8266. There are many tutorials.
But you have to solder and flash the esp8266/arduino.
WH2601 only has solar-power and battery - the batterys will not be charged! You can build your own power-supply for this, if you want to wire the outside-station. Very bad thing. A charging-Feature would be great, so you don´t have to change batterys every now and then.
Is this the same on all WH26xx Weather stations? Or only on the new WH2601 SE ?
Can you read out the data from the outside station with a CUL oder RFXCOM ? So no need for the indoor station anymore?
Is there also a way to enter the ip of your OH2-Server to the weather station instead of wunderground? So the weatherstation sends data directly to your server? So you only have to parse this data, when something new arrives? Is this a better way then screen scraping of the internal website?
