Changes in my Weather Station#

For the past 8 years I’ve managed a personal weather station consisting of a Davis Vantagse Pro and a Windows computer running the excellent Weather Display software. Last December I decided that the inexpensive computer I was running the scripts on may well be coming to its end-of-life and went looking for alternatives. Another goal of this move was to lower my cost of operations. The Jetway computer I was running didn’t use a lot of power, perhaps 25 W, but if I could do better, I would. After all, at 25 watts, that’s about 219 kW or $26.25 annually. With the growth of small computers such as the Raspberry Pi, I knew I could do better.

After some mucking around, I found Meteobridge. Meteobridge is software that gets flashed onto a TP-Link TL-3060Mr (and some other similar devices). While not nearly as full-featured as Weather Display, the Meteobridge software works well and sends the data to my website without problems. Best of all, the total price was about $100 and will use about 0.6 W, that’s about 5.256 kW or a whopping 63 cents per year! The whole shebang will pay for it self in about 3.5 years. Sweet!

But the Meteobridge has a couple of caveats. One is that it doesn’t store data, so a separate device is needed for that (it does have the ability to save to a mysql database hosted elsewhere). Nor does it generate the NOAA style reports that are needed for some of the calculations and webpages that I generate (for example, the freeze data – first and last freeze dates for the year, number of days below freezing, etc). Another caveat is that the updates are available only for two years, then you have to buy an update license. Having not had to do that yet, I don’t know the cost. Perhaps another caveat is that the product is dependent on the Meteobridge server. The OS is not actually stored on the device but is downloaded each time the server reboots. Now, my server has run for as many as 133 days without a hiccup, so that doesn’t happen often. But it could. This can be mitigated by including a USB stick on the device so that the data are saved, together with a copy of software for those eventualities when the MB server isn’t available. Good to know!

So, for now, I’m sticking with the Meteobridge. Overall, I like it and have found workarounds to the issues that have cropped up. One of those is the Raspberry Pi and weewx. I’ll deal with that in another post.