Process data from a weather station with Linux

Weather Outlook

© Lead Image © Tithi Luadthong, 123rf.com

© Lead Image © Tithi Luadthong, 123rf.com

Article from Issue 288/2024
Author(s):

A DVB-T stick retrieves information from a professional weather station and stores it in a database for downstream processing.

If you frequently check the daily weather forecast, having your own weather station might be a good thing. However, professional devices are expensive, and they also mean that the amateur meteorologist is locked in to the display panels of the weather station vendor. As a rule, it is impossible to use the measured values in your own applications.

The cost driver is not typically the sensors in the weather stations, but the display modules. A DIY solution could handle the measurement-only tasks, but the sensor technology must be energy-saving and weatherproof. This is not easy to implement in a DIY project and adds to the overhead and costs. As an alternative, you could use the sensors of a professional weather station and draw on the data it provides for your project. In this article, I show you how to tap into the data stream of a weather station with a standard DVB-T USB stick, store the data in a database, and visualize it with Grafana [1].

Hardware

First of all, you need a sensor (Figure 1) suitable for your weather station project. Sensors like this are available for relatively little cash. I used a 5-in-1 outdoor sensor by Bresser [2] for around EUR80. The price and features can vary, and similar sensors with more features can be obtained at a lower price; it might be worth doing a little research. Bresser seems to restrict shipping to Continental Europe – the AcuRite Iris 06014 PRO+ [3] is a similar product that's available from Amazon.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Software-Defined Radio

    Armed with a US$ 20 hunk of hardware and a free software-defined radio tool, Konstantin starts the hunt for radio-transmitted data from a weather station.

  • Instrumented Garden

    Place long-range wireless sensors in a garden and keep track of ambient conditions with gauges and time-based graphs.

  • Tapping Data with the RaspPi

    If you have a weather station that allows you to access data via a USB port, you can use your Raspberry Pi to analyze the data and publish the results via a web application.

  • Charly's Column: Weather Page

    To find out what the weather is like, sys admin columnist Charly Kühnast no longer needs to go outdoors get wet, blown away, frozen to death, or sunburned.

  • Frogs
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News