I’ve recently put my Maplin weather station back online, feeding data to wunderground.com.  This is a live object that links to the site to show the current local weather conditions:

I bought mine from Maplin, where it is currently £99.99, however it is often substantially discounted during their sales.  It includes an outside station that measures wind strength and direction, temperature and humidity, linking wirelessly to a master unit with a large touchscreen LCD (fairly clear but not the best contrast) that has a USB port to connect to a computer.

The supplied software is ugly, unreliable and doesn’t do very much; it’s really not even worth the bother of installing.  Instead, I strongly recommend either using Cumulus of Pywws.

Cumulus is the simpler option.  It’s a Windows program and installs in a few seconds.  Configuration is easy via some setup screens where you can tell it what weather station you have, and what internet uploads to perform (e.g. to wunderground, APRS).  I ran this for a few days it worked very well.  The UI is quite nice and the software didn’t crash, though I did have to restart it once or twice when it lost contact with the weather station (I’m pretty sure this is a “feature” of some of these stations).

Running Cumulus continuously (do it uploads live data) does of course mean having a Windows PC on all the time.  This in turn means converting money into heat which you might not want to do especially in the summer months.  For both these reasons I turned to a solution that I could install on a Raspberry Pi.

I followed these excellent instructions to install pywws on a spare Raspberry Pi.  This needs to be a model B or B+ or V2 B, because it needs a USB port to connect to the weather station plus an internet connection (LAN or second USB for wireless LAN).

pywws can upload data periodically to your own web site for viewing, but I prefer to have it upload data live to wunderground.com.  To do this you need to create an account there (free), add the position of your weather station, and then enter the account details into the pywws weather.ini file.  Once it’s all working, wunderground.com will show live and historic data from your station:

live

plot

6 Replies to “Raspberry Pi Weather Station”

  1. Dave is your first picture of a screen that can be produced on wunderground.com as seen by a say Google Chrome. I see the usb stations are now down to £59.
    Nice looking project .
    TerryR

  2. Have you found a way to upload missed data from Cumulus to Wunderground if the internet connect goes missing?

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