Multi-room temp/humidity monitoring via ambient weather.

[Fellhahn]

I originally mentioned these details in a reply post to a weather thread, but thought people might benefit from the extra visibility here.

Some recent developments:

A) Two users on this forum have both started creating HS3 plugins for Ambient Weather:

https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/3r...weather-plugin

https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/we...beta-available

B) Ambient Weather have released a firmware update for their ObserverIP module that allows connecting an additional 8 temp/humidity units, for a total of 10:

https://www.ambientweather.com/wswsfiup.html (See notes under 4.4.5)

The model of the additional units that can be added:

https://www.ambientweather.com/amwh31b.html

At about $9 USD per unit, these seem like a very cost effective way of gathering temperature readings. By comparison most Z-Wave modules that offer temperature monitoring as an extra (such as the Aeotecs or Qubinos) retail for $50-$60 USD each.

Now I have not yet done this myself, so can't guarantee it as a process, but you could theoretically position several indoor temperature/humidity units around your home. The AW ObserverIP module gathers and transmits this data to your AmbientWeather dashboard. The new plugin by Jeubanks scrapes this info from your dashboard and updates the values of virtual devices within HS3. You use these virtual device values to control event triggers for devices like air conditioning, heating or de-humidification.

I'll order additional indoor sensors and try this out some time in the future. But as a dirty foreigner I typically wait until I need to make a collection of purchases before buying from the US, shipping's a killer so it pays to combine.

Also if you are considering purchasing an Ambient Weather setup but haven't been keeping up with the weather nerd news, please DON'T connect your weather station to the WeatherUnderground/Wunderground network. WeatherUnderground was purchased by IBM earlier this year and has started behaving like a sack of phalluses ever since:

https://apicommunity.wunderground.co...ent=topic_link

[sirmeili]

Quick question, would this allow local communication or is i still need internet to scrape the data? I'm unfamiliar with ambientWeather, but like the idea of cheap temp/humidity monitoring.

[Fellhahn]

Quick question, would this allow local communication or is i still need internet to scrape the data? I'm unfamiliar with ambientWeather, but like the idea of cheap temp/humidity monitoring.

At the moment it would require an internet connection. Jeubanks has mentioned the possibility of scraping directly from an ObserverIP module but he lacks the hardware to develop/test this.

[simplextech]

At the moment it would require an internet connection. Jeubanks has mentioned the possibility of scraping directly from an ObserverIP module but he lacks the hardware to develop/test this.

Slight correction. The current plugin is using the official REST API. In order to pull data directly from the ObserverIP module that would require doing HTML data scraping. I will need to see how these new sensors are added into the AmbientWeather.Net system and if they show up in the JSON output of a PWS to get the information on adding them to the plugin.