I did this with some rando soil sensors on clearance from my local Jaycar (very popular store in Australia, similar to Tandy, Dick Smith, or Radio Shack when they were still around).
Anyway, it wasn’t in the library of known devices in RTL433, but I was really impressed that I was able to get it up and running with community tools and doco to parse and reformat the transmissions.
I used to paraglide and I was very vaguely looking into options for getting wind and other weather data from sites - back in the 00's it was still pretty complex, and I got as far as prototyping a very simple set up which was simply a LCD weather station in a box, with a symbian smart phone pointing at it. If you sent it a text message, it would snap a picture and send it back via MMS or email. I barely got it working, but never tried it in anger - most of the sites I flew didn't have 3g at the time.
Amazing to see what options are possible now, I really should get a weather station going again, I wonder if I could get the signal from the beach near my house, as that would be more interesting than my garden.
It's still not 'push button' easy, but it's nearly there. It only took reading through a few blog posts and a couple GitHub issues to solve the minor issues I ran into.
I just wish one of the companies like Acurite would maintain an official integration into tools like WeeWX or Home Assistant, or build a model using a standard like Zigbee or Z-Wave, but that has a lot of switching costs too.
I went through a bunch of nonsense trying to read some lacrosse weather sensors with a pi years ago. It was a lot of work, and you had to repair the sensors each time the batteries died.
A couple years later, I came across the Ambient Weather sensors, like the F007TH and they were easily readable by rtl433. I had to hack it to just read and output the temperature. The good part was they were AA powered, but used dip switches for addresses. When the batteries ran down you could just change the batteries and the same address would work again.
That said, if I were to upgrade, the acurite here is nice because you can solar power everything instead of chasing battery outages.
I did this with some rando soil sensors on clearance from my local Jaycar (very popular store in Australia, similar to Tandy, Dick Smith, or Radio Shack when they were still around).
Anyway, it wasn’t in the library of known devices in RTL433, but I was really impressed that I was able to get it up and running with community tools and doco to parse and reformat the transmissions.
I used to paraglide and I was very vaguely looking into options for getting wind and other weather data from sites - back in the 00's it was still pretty complex, and I got as far as prototyping a very simple set up which was simply a LCD weather station in a box, with a symbian smart phone pointing at it. If you sent it a text message, it would snap a picture and send it back via MMS or email. I barely got it working, but never tried it in anger - most of the sites I flew didn't have 3g at the time.
Amazing to see what options are possible now, I really should get a weather station going again, I wonder if I could get the signal from the beach near my house, as that would be more interesting than my garden.
It's still not 'push button' easy, but it's nearly there. It only took reading through a few blog posts and a couple GitHub issues to solve the minor issues I ran into.
I just wish one of the companies like Acurite would maintain an official integration into tools like WeeWX or Home Assistant, or build a model using a standard like Zigbee or Z-Wave, but that has a lot of switching costs too.
I went through a bunch of nonsense trying to read some lacrosse weather sensors with a pi years ago. It was a lot of work, and you had to repair the sensors each time the batteries died.
A couple years later, I came across the Ambient Weather sensors, like the F007TH and they were easily readable by rtl433. I had to hack it to just read and output the temperature. The good part was they were AA powered, but used dip switches for addresses. When the batteries ran down you could just change the batteries and the same address would work again.
That said, if I were to upgrade, the acurite here is nice because you can solar power everything instead of chasing battery outages.