Building a Weather Station

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • rtl_433

    Program to decode radio transmissions from devices on the ISM bands (and other frequencies)

    Why wait?

    Those fancy weather stations often transmit to the indoor LCD display using fairly simply messages sent in the 433 MHz band or the 915 MHz band. For many those message formats have been reverse engineered and decoders for them added to open source SDR software such as rtl_433 [1].

    With a $30 USB RTL-SDR and rtl_433 you can then use the sensor units from many of those fancy units as inputs to your own display and analysis software. And you can often use your neighbors' sensors too. One of my neighbors--I still haven't figured out which--has an AcuRite 5-in-1 system and I can see its readings using my RTL-SDR and rtl_433.

    If you build your own sensors it is cheap and easy to add a 433 MHz transmitter and define your own message format. Rtl_433 can be extended to cover new message formats by giving it a config file that describes the formats.

    There's a driver for Weewx to let it use rtl_433 [3].

    You can get an RTL-SDR and rtl_433 now, and start playing around with whatever sensors others in your neighborhood happen to have.

    [1] https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433

    [2] https://www.acurite.com/shop-all/weather-instruments/weather...

    [3] https://github.com/matthewwall/weewx-sdr

  • weewx-sdr

    weewx driver for software-defined radio

    Why wait?

    Those fancy weather stations often transmit to the indoor LCD display using fairly simply messages sent in the 433 MHz band or the 915 MHz band. For many those message formats have been reverse engineered and decoders for them added to open source SDR software such as rtl_433 [1].

    With a $30 USB RTL-SDR and rtl_433 you can then use the sensor units from many of those fancy units as inputs to your own display and analysis software. And you can often use your neighbors' sensors too. One of my neighbors--I still haven't figured out which--has an AcuRite 5-in-1 system and I can see its readings using my RTL-SDR and rtl_433.

    If you build your own sensors it is cheap and easy to add a 433 MHz transmitter and define your own message format. Rtl_433 can be extended to cover new message formats by giving it a config file that describes the formats.

    There's a driver for Weewx to let it use rtl_433 [3].

    You can get an RTL-SDR and rtl_433 now, and start playing around with whatever sensors others in your neighborhood happen to have.

    [1] https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433

    [2] https://www.acurite.com/shop-all/weather-instruments/weather...

    [3] https://github.com/matthewwall/weewx-sdr

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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