One of the major draws of the Hubitat is that it’s local control. The only things that I have that use the Internet (so far) are communication to my iPhone and Alexa integration. Neither of those are required functions for my home to work. What I’d like to add soon (hoping for a Black Friday sale) is a weather station that can be integrated into Hubitat that does use the Internet at all. Values for temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind, and rainfall are wanted. Bonus points for a solar rig so that I don’t have to put one together to run it or run a power line. I’ve looked through several threads in the community and I’ve not seen such a device.
PC has Internet Information Services (IIS) setup and running (PC should be firewalled from access outside the LAN)
I use a PC program called Weather Display Weather Display - the Weather Station software and it runs on an old PC. I use a Davis Vantage Pro2 with a serial interface connected to the PC. The Weather Display software takes the weather station data and stores it on the PC. Then using one of the software's built in options I built a json file that contains all the data I wish to bring into Hubitat. Then using a http call within Hubitat I read in that json file and store all the data in variables.
Fair warning. Weather Display is a Swiss army knife that can do a lot of things so it isn't very intuitive. You must understand how it works and how IIS works and that you are knowledgeable enough how to set it. Beside using it to get weather data inside Hubitat there is a wealth of other useful things you can do with it. I have been collecting and providing weather data for over 20 years so unless you are fascinated with the weather this may not be the best project to take on. If my only goal was to get weather data into Hubitat locally I wouldn't bother as there is too much effort as to what I got out of it. But to answer, yes, it can be done, and is being done.
I plan on buying a weather station for this purpose. Not sure what yet. Any recommendations?
I have 4 (out of around a dozen) Windows boxes that run 24/7. But I'd likely buy a dedicated PC (Dell Optiplex) just for the weather. But looking at the Weather Display page, it says it'll run on a Raspberry Pi. So I might try it on a Kangaroo PCs (if I can find the danged thing... now found) that I bought when they came out and don't have a use for at the moment. Then invest in a better PC down the road.
It's been a few years since I've used ISS, but getting back into the swing of it shouldn't be too hard. I'm a lot more proficient on Windows than OSX or any Linux distro.
Is this something I need? No. Am I heavily into weather? Again no. But it's something I want and could be a part of this (home automation) hobby and help with another hobby of mine. One of the items I want to do is correlate power consumption to weather patterns. I'd rather have accurate local weather.
If we're talking about a couple of hundred dollars of expense, I could buy this week. If several hundred, it might be next month (November). If looking at 4 digits, then I'd have to reconsider if I want to invest that much money. Time, on the other hand, isn't nearly as critical on getting it up and running as some of the other Hubitat items.
I use something similar as the above poster but it’s not really integrated in my Hubitat.
I have a Vantage pro 2 console that has weather link ip in it. The weather link ip is connected to the Meteobridge device and it captures all the weather information. The Meteobridge uploads a real-time file to my local server and I display that information on a iPad. I’ll post a picture later.
I think some people on wx-forum are using the ecowitt gw-1000 for local weather information combined with different sensors.
The EcoWitt PWS are the same sensor array that Ambient Weather sells. Their EcoWitt GW-1000 is very easy to integrate with external systems. The combination of their PWS and GW-1000 provides a completely local PWS setup.
You could also go with Ambient Weather with their ObserverIP which is the older local PWS receiver (pre GW-1000) which is local but you have to scrape the data as it only provide a local web page for viewing the data. If scraping the system runs out of memory if polled too frequently and crashes.
A very popular setup is WeeWX and it supports multiple Sensor arrays. The WeatherFlow system data is also available local without internet required.
For Hubitat integration none of these are "out of the box" though and will require development.
ELR (extreme long range) 22LR. For example shooting a 22 rifle at a target 500 yards away. When shooting steel, you shoot and just shy of 4 seconds later you hear the very faint "ding". A gnat can fart near the line of flight and make you miss the target. [grin] Seriously though, you're looking at a flight time of 1.95 seconds and with a sight height of 2 inches, a 3 degree cant will put the round off center by 38.48 inches (3.21 feet). Weather has become another big variable I've had to factor into the calculations.
I've considered buying some weather stations to place at the local range.
As far as weather stations, you get what you pay for. Because I've been in the weather hobby for 20 years I have know that quality counts if you expect things to last but paying a thousand dollars for a weather station is probably not in most budgets. Weather Display works with a lot of weather stations but the key is finding a station that has an interface (COM port) or some type of USB device to send it's data through. Weather-Watch.com - Index is a forum that has all the info you need.
Weather Display software creates its own web pages but I don't think it has a web server built in, hence the need for IIS on windows, but any web server will do as long as you can point it to the directory containing all the weather data. I run Weather Display on an old Optiplex but run several other things on it too. Weather Display is light on resources so most anything will do. Below is a screen shot of the page in Weather Display where you feed it a template and name the output file. That is the easy part but its getting all the other bazillion settings that is a little time consuming. But once its done you don't have to fool with it anymore.
This I agree with. I have a Davis Vantage Pro 2 that lasted 5 years before it died. I replaced it with a ambient weather that lasted 16 months and then the wind speed quit working, console wouldn’t accept firmware updates. I ended up going back to the Davis Weather Station.
Another reason Davis is the best for quality is you can get parts for anything it that breaks. They have been around a long time. There are so many cheap fly-by-night budget stations that are only in production a year and then they make something else. Replacement parts are non existent which causes you to scrap the entire station and buy a new or different one. With Davis you can add different features whenever you want. Just need to spend more money.
The only thing that has failed in the past eight years was my solar radiation fan (optional)
Another vote for Davis. They are expensive but they seem to hold up better than the cheaper units. I had a Honeywell/Meade system that worked fairly well for several years but is almost dead now. I will replace it with a Davis. I was using WView on a Pi but it does not appear to be supported any more.
Looks to me like Both are identical other than the VP2 Plus includes the Solar and UV sensors and their mounting bridge, and the VP2 does not. Not sure if there is any other differences. You could always add those to the VP2 later.
I have a Davis station with the new WeatherLink Live network receiver which provides a local REST with JSON endpoint which can be polled and I have a very basic driver I wrote to grab data from it (it also provides a push UDP feed but Hubitat UDP support isn't capable of using it)
