18.1 °C
About This Weather Station
Weatherstation Location
Almere Noorderplassen (show on the photo) is a neighborhood in Almere stad. It is a unique location situated around 3 meters below sea level in the province of Flevoland. This area is part of the new land reclaimed in the 1950s from the former Zuiderzee, demonstrating the incredible Dutch engineering in land reclamation. Our home is build on this newly claimed land, surrounded by the beautiful Noorderplassen lakes.
Flevoland enjoys a temperate maritime climate, influenced by the proximity of the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. These large bodies of water have a moderating effect on the temperatures experienced in the region, contributing to its distinctive climate.
Technical Information
What is WeeWX?
Weewx is a free, open-source weather software designed to run on various operating systems, including Linux, macOS, and Windows. It is capable of collecting data from a wide range of personal weather stations and generating customizable reports, graphs, and weather summaries in real-time. WeeWX supports several hardware brands and allows data to be published to various web services like Weather Underground, as well as being displayed on personal websites. Weewx is written and maintained by Tom Keffer, Matthew Wall, and Gary Roderick.
Why Use WeeWX with Your Weather Station?
Compatibility: WeeWX works with numerous weather stations, making it flexible for different setups.
Customization: Users can create custom reports and visualizations tailored to their preferences.
Data Ownership: Unlike many commercial services, WeeWX allows you to fully control and own your weather data.
Local and Online Data Sharing: You can store data locally or upload it to weather services and personal websites.
Community Support: Being open-source, WeeWX has an active community of users contributing improvements and offering help.
If you have a weather station and want to harness its full potential, WeeWX provides a robust, customizable, and user-friendly solution.
The weather station used is a Ventus W830. A precision sensor suite that measures temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, UV index, solar radiation, and barometric pressure.
The data is wirelessly transmitted by Ventus sensors in the garden to a color display inside, and is connected to the internet and the Weewx software to publish sensors data. The public data can be found on WeatherUnderground and on PWSweather.
The Weewx software run at my home on a Linux docker based solution. Docker enables the easy and fast deployment of new applications like Weewx. The Weewx container is developed and maintained by Tom Mitchell and can be found on dockerhub.
Under the birdhouse is an small project housing containing an ESP32 module powered by battery and solar panel, collecting the temperature on 10cm and 150cm above ground. The ESP32 module is configured via ESPHOME and Home Assistant making configuring and adding new sensors so easy. The data is uploaded via wifi to my MQTT broker on Home Assistant. Weewx is subscibed to the MQTT topics and pulling the data in.
Additional Sensors
The air pollution data (2.5uM and 10uM dust) is collected via the Sensor.community network where people can build there own aiq quality sensors and upload that data to sensor community network website.
Via a homeassistant plugin, the data is retrieved and used for monitoring purposes, in this case injected in Weewx. One of community.sensors is within 500 meters and very relevant for our location. The data is pulledin to Weewx via MQTT.
The same applies for the real time lightning detection via blitzortung plugin in Home Assistant.
Weewx Plugins
To enhance Weewx with more nice features, three other Weewx plugins are used:
Belchertown: delivering the great look and feel of my weather website. The latest docker image has the Belchertown skin included. Developed and Maintained by Pat on github.
Interceptor: capturing the data from the weather console. Developed and Maintained by Matthew Wall on github
MQTT Subscriber: capturing more data from the MQTT broker on my Home Assistant Software.Developed and Maintained by Rich Bell on github
Weewx Wiki: A overview of all the plugins can be found at the weewx wiki
Software Versions
| Software | Version |
|---|---|
| Weewx | 5.1.0 |
| Belchertown | 1.3.1 |
| Interceptor | 0.6.0 |
| MQTT Subscriber | 3.0.0-rc08 |
| Firmware Ventus W830 | EasyWeather 1.6.9 |
| The Weewx station uptime is | 2 days, 1 hour, 36 minutes |
| About Webpage version | P130924-1 |
Future Plans
The data provided by the Weather station is great and useful, but I want to enhance the data even more with more accurate sensors. Also, I want to remove the dependency from public data and collect my own data like air pollution and lightning data. High om my wish list for many years is to monitor earthquake data. But first need to start with the basic stuff.
This means that that at least three new projects are planned, where building an instrument shelter home is the top priority and project.
There are two options here:
building an official Stevensons instrument shelter (which is difficult and at least 100 hours of building) Or just build that is not official, but functional the same and much quicker to build.
Here you can find the drawings for the instrument shelter.
In the meantime, I am reading and gathering information about the new sensors that I will use
The main platform is going to be ESP32 Wroom because of the external antenna. This is all going to be managed by Home Assistant and "programmed" via ESPHOME. All the sensors on my list are supported by ESPHOME so that is going to be easy.
The third project is going to be designing and building a electronic PCB holding and connecting all the sensors via I2C
All my progress I will post here ... to be continued