Putting a dumb weather station on the internet | Hacker News Reader

Putting a dumb weather station on the internet

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163 pointstodsacerdoti43 comments

Every time someone does a project like this, it exposes how trivial “IoT” really is once you strip away vendor lock in and buzzwords. A $3 sensor, a 10 line script, and a 40 year old ham protocol outperform half the commercial weather APIs out there.

There's a magical world out there where Tuya leave us with the ability to OTA flash custom firmware of we have physical access, and then we can all just run ESPHome on private wifi networks.

And what recovery mechanisms do you have in place when the OTA flash goes wrong?

same recovery mechanism as when the Crowdstrike OTA goes wrong

you can have 2 identical partitions on the ESP, the OTA flashes the inactive partition and signals to bootloader to attempt to boot it from there.

the device is restarted, if the new firmware is working correctly you signal the update process that everything is all right and it sets the new partition as default.

if the device doesn't boot correctly, or your sanity checks don't pass, either you or the watchdog restarts the device and it boot from the known-working partition.

I didn't ask what can you have. We could have whatever safety processes we wanted with multiple levels of redundancy. However, that's not what's available on COTS IoT devices though, so speculation does not help.

Flashing the firmware of a cheap IoT device remotely OTA is not without risk.

Surely the basic flashing mechanisms used nowadays will first check checksum (and hopefully a device magic), and then you have a relatively short time window when it actually does the flashing after which it reboots? Even small devices nowadays seem to have the memory for it. So there is a window of failure, but it's not a very long one.

Well, in addition to flashing the incorrect or buggy firmware.

That actually is exactly how it works today with ESPHome flashed to the Tuya related chips. It's also the only way to do OTA: download into second partition, switch boot.

But more widely: you just don't need to flash devices very often.

Moreover OTA is just because that's something we used to be able to do till Tuya shutdown the cloud cutter hack which could do it (which also requires physical access - you have to reboot the device into flashing mode, you can still do it but you can't custom flash anymore OTA on most newer ones).

I'm sorry I wasn't clear. This is already implemented on the ESP32 by the hardware vendor.

EDIT: to further clarify, there are no gotchas or anything, you can use your own servers and require the images to be signed or not.

With respect, this misses some important constraints. Scale it to thousands of locations and target 99% SLA. Now you have a maintenance problem in remote physical places, requirements for hardware reliability, subcontractors to manage, need a reliable network connectivity, etc. You also need to collect and redistribute the data (API or whatever) - while this is a trivial problem today, still you incur costs for hosting, network, etc. While I actually agree with the sentiment, it is not just a $3 sensor either.

To be generous, this solution 'outperforms' commercial weather APIs for exactly one hyperlocal geographic location, and underperforms on 99.999999% of the remaining locations that may also be experiencing weather of some sort.

JFY, there are thousands of weather stations reporting the temperature across the globe on the APRS network. Fairly easy to check temperatures for most places at zero cost and without internet.

https://aprs.fi/

You might consider joining the Citizen Weather Observer Program. It's a great way to share your data with other station owners.

http://www.wxqa.com/

I had a station for a few years. The receiver had a usb interface so no software radio required. I used weewx to import the data. I even had a water temperature sensor off the end of my dock so I could see if the lake was warm enough to swim in.

Uk weather office has a similar effort apparently - select registered sites and disable the official ones here:

https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/

Interesting to see that it gets many submissions from outside UK too

"If you want to support me, send me AA batteries" in the bot account profile made me chuckle.

Slightly tangential, my hope is that the Blitzortung project picks up momentum.

> Blitzortung.org and Lightningmaps.org are world-wide non-commercial low-cost community-based lightning detection and lightning location networks. They provide free real time lightning maps for a lot of count

[docs of the projects](https://docs.lightningmaps.org)

[real-time lightening map](https://map.blitzortung.org)

The sensor network is great, the website is long in the tooth.

I want to do the reverse: I have a DIY esp32 "weather" station (temp/humidity but more importantly particle sensor) and I would love to share it via radio!

This reminds me...

My parents gave me a smart weather station for Christmas a few years ago. I never even took it out of the box. I know it exposes a web server so I can view a fancy UI in my browser...

I should take it out of the box and run a pentest on it. I imagine it's pretty insecure. The developers of these types of things often don't consider security.

Holy cow, cheap weather stations are encoding and decoding JSON? What a century.

No, the tool rtl_433 repackages payload data in json for easier downstream consumption.

What’s the best homebrew weather station out there? Currently I’ve got my eye on https://3dpaws.comet.ucar.edu/ but interested to hear about others.

I was kinda expecting analogue tech and computer vision here. :D Nice work.

The very first cable weather "channel" was a large circular base at least 4' diameter (don't remember exact size, but big) that had various full size gauges on it. A camera was positioned to look down on the gauge under it. The whole table top rotated so that each gauge would continuously cycle under the camera. When you viewed the channel, you'd have to wait until the gauge you wanted to see rotated back around.

Been meaning to DIY a weather solution too...just need to figure out how to power it on balcony (no power). Thinking perhaps via the new sodium batteries & explore that too while at it.

If you live in a moderately dense area or know a neighbor who also has a weather station, you might try the command line utility rtl_433[0] mentioned in the article with an SDR dongle to pick up existing broadcasts in your area. I pick up three different stations consistently!

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

I did try it a while back and only picked up industrial fridges...presumably a restaurant...apparently those run on same tech

Moving soon though so should give it another try then

my winter project is to create a container pod at home that remixes media, maybe adds in some old or joke tv commercials between shows, and most importantly, shows the weather and the route to work at 7am. i think everything exists to do this, but it might take a few weeks to cobble together.

For even more retro points, have the UI presented by WeatherStar! https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com/

I was very grateful to the author for `aprs-weather-submit` while building cwop.rest. Great post.

Cool project but I would just have used a zigbee/wifi weather station, they are just as cheap.

I get the sense from the article that part of the fun was doing this via radio frequencies rather than having to deal with a network.

> At this point, we've connected the Temu weather station to the Internet and the ham radio network. Anyone with an APRS-enabled radio, digipeater, receiver, or just a web browser can see what the temperature and humidity are at my house.

links? the closest thing is 10x the price, some are more like $80, some $180

Nearly all off the shelf weather station parts use 433Mhz or similar bands. It’s likely that if you have any preexisting wireless temp sensors, etc that transmit to an indoor display, you can use those with a system like this. I also think that range and battery life is better for these simpler sensors.

Wi-Fi is pretty bad for battery powered devices.

this is one of the most fascinating and funniest articles i've read in a while

I expected "putting something on the internet" to mean being to talk to a device directly, not taking its data and publishing it somewhere. Is it just me?

Yes.

All this device ever does is publish results, so it’s not clear what interacting directly would mean

Mostly looking for vulnerabilities, probably

Man, the interesting bits like decoding the radio signals to temperature isn't even in the article.

Also, the temperature measurement is probably not accurate to 2 decimal places, but the "toot" converts 7.2 C to 44.96 F. Someone needs to learn about significant digits.

W.r.t. decoding signals to temperatures: They mention using rtl_433 which is an awesome piece of software that does that for you.

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