r/myweatherstation

This might be a little different from the usual prepper post, but it came from the same place.

After Hurricane Fiona, we were without power for around 9–12 days here in Nova Scotia, and some people around us were out even longer. That storm really made me realize how messy it is trying to keep track of everything during a long outage. Power company website, weather alerts, road conditions, cameras, battery levels, internet, Starlink, random local updates… it all ends up spread across a bunch of apps and websites.

So I started building this Home Assistant dashboard as a kind of “what’s going on right now?” screen for the house.

It’s not meant to be a clean little phone dashboard. It’s busy on purpose. I wanted something I could throw on a TV or wall display and glance at from across the room to see what needs attention.

Right now it shows:

• NS Power outages, affected customers, markers, and outage map
• Environment Canada alerts and weather
• Weather radar / rain map
• Local emergency / fire ticker
• Ecowitt weather station info like temp, pressure, rain, wind, and gusts
• Nova Scotia highway traffic cameras
• Starlink Mini stats like ping, download/upload, power draw, connectivity, usage, heating, and last restart
• Tapo H500 / security camera status
• EcoFlow battery banks with battery %, stored kWh, total load, and output draw
• Calendar, sunrise/sunset, and lunar phase

Most of it uses a basic traffic-light idea. Green is fine, yellow means keep an eye on it, red means I should probably check something. During a storm or outage, I don’t want to read every tiny number. I just want the screen to make the important stuff obvious.

The power side is the bigger prepper part for me. My Starlink Mini is running on DC power through my EcoFlow setup, and the security cameras are also being kept on DC instead of regular AC outlets. With the batteries and a Bluetti Charger 1 alternator charger in my vehicle, I can usually get around 24–30 hours of runtime depending on load and how much I’m topping things back up.

This doesn’t replace the boring important stuff like water, food, flashlights, heat, radios, etc. It’s more of an information layer. During Fiona, not knowing what was going on was one of the most annoying parts, so this is my attempt at putting the important info in one place.

I’m still tweaking the layout, opacity, font sizes, and how readable it is from across the room, but it has turned into one of my favourite Home Assistant projects.

I’m including a short video/screen recording of it running, plus the YAML in case anyone wants to pick through it or borrow ideas.

Dashboard YAML:
https://pastebin.com/3NMqkyM6

Configuration YAML:
https://pastebin.com/7v14MSRB

It’s probably overbuilt and definitely not minimalist, but that was kind of the point. I wanted something more like a household storm board than a normal smart home dashboard.

A while back I started developing my own weather station from scratch using Arduino as my microcontroller and then eventually switching to ESP8266. I work in the paragliding industry and I am a pilot myself. I can imagine those in this industry would understand just how important weather stations are to us, and reliable ones too. We use them everyday to look ahead of the wind direction to see what is on it’s way. We see it’s a gusty SE day so we look further up at SE weather stations to know what wind strengths to expect and how soon. If one of these stations are offline it makes it really difficult for us to make a safe call, especially commercially. This is why I intend on building for my community my own weather stations so that I can both earn a bit more income and dive deeper into my interest in electronics as well as weather forecasts and predictions.

In the pictures attached you guys will see what is my basic prototype of a weather station for at home. It currently only includes temperature and humidity sensors as I haven’t yet gotten to build additional sensors and I wouldn’t like to jump the gun if the concept won’t work.

I realized in my previous version that the radiation shield I had used was practically useless in terms of reliable readings as it traps heat and that’s a big no no. I then came up with the idea of making my own shield with parts bought from the hardware store. I decided on using 5 110mm PVC endcaps along with threaded rods, nuts and washers to create an even spacing between each layer. I went with a spacing of 20mm, but before adding the sensors I thought to halt as I’m doubting if this would work. To me I fear that rain will enter and potentially if not definitely destroy my sensors. I am trying to stay optimistic, but I am also very realistic and sometimes too cautious.

Let me know what you guys think of this DIY Radiation Shield and if and how I could improve it. Preferably not by 3D printing because otherwise that would’ve been my first option.

List of components I’m using

•Nodemcu v2 12F
•Two Led’s For Status Indication And Fault Detection
•Two DHT11 Temp & Humidity Sensors(Cheap, but only for testing purposes)
•LM2596 Buck Converter
•Cheap Solar Charge Controller
•12v 7Ah battery
•Two 9v 5w Solar Panels In Series

I’m using Blynk services to display data on my phone remotely. This is crucial as it doesn’t require me to enable port forwarding on my router which requires additional fees through my ISP subscription.

MyAcurite is going away so I built a replacement app in an afternoon. It was mostly to prove a point to these companies. Building one of these isn’t hard.
I’m testing it now with my AWN (Ambient Weather Network) account. The catch is you have to deploy your own server (something like fly.io works fine) and bring your own API keys to process the AWN data. So not exactly plug and play yet.
If folks here would actually use this, I’m happy to publish a GitHub repo with a full how-to so anyone comfortable with a server deployment can run it themselves for free.
If enough people would rather skip all that, I’d put in the work to host the processing side as a web portal. That version could include the DNS redirect option for people who still have the hub, plus maybe other data sources. It would have to be a small subscription just to cover hosting. I’m not rich, so I can’t pay the server bill for everyone, but I’m not trying to make money off it either.
Anyone want any of this? Trying to figure out if it’s worth more effort or if I should just throw the repo up and call it good. Thanks.

Looking for a new weather station for my mother, which of these would you pick or something else in this price range.

My AmbientWeather WS-2902 looks to be in pretty rough shape. It's about 6 years old. I took it down from where it was installed on my shed since we're preparing to move. Should I even bother packing this and setting it up at the new house or just start over with a new one? The solar panel looks to be fried. It's pretty heavily UV damaged. It was still transmitting data to the station inside and still working, but should I just use this as an opportunity to upgrade?