Requesting guidance on purchasing a HS3/HS4 compatible WS

[MrWassen]

Hi guys,

I am new to weather stations and am looking to implement a basic WS that as a minimum can provide outdoor temp, rainfall and humidity metrics to my HS3 (perhaps HS4 in the not too distant future). I have been looking at some of the available Ambient devices and can see that there always is some sort of console included in the package. I am not interested in having a separate piece of hardware for this but am simply looking to view basic weather info in HS.

If I purchase something like the WS-2902 + the AmbientWeather PI, can it run without the console and connect directly to HS or will the console have to sit in an equipment cabinet and function as an "always on" server to make it all work?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Dennis

[Pete]

I have a wireless Davis weatherstation here which typically uses a console. Instead of a console for HS I use a Meteostick. I can still utilize a console with the Meteostick.

[langenet]

Like you, I could care less for a console. This is why I purchases an Ambient Weather WS-1550--IP. I got it maintly for rain and wind for my irrigation system control. One thing to note is that if it is in the sun, you will get an over-inflated temperature against those provide my weather sources like Environment Canada since they measure outdoor temperature in the shade. Otherwise, it's okay and does the job.

[upstatemike]

I am using a Weatherflow station (now called Tempest) with Homeseer and it has been very reliable. Homeseer gives me voice warnings for rain starting, lightning, or high wind and gives me a spoken summary each morning of the temperature. "feels like" temperature, humidity, and pressure trend. I expect it can do what you need.

[jim@beersman.com]

Dennis, the console in the WS-2902 package is what communicates with the Weather devices and then provides the WiFi capabilities. With out the console you would need another device such as the ObserverIP to gather the data and send it to Ambient Weather or be polled by the Ambient Weather Plugin. My experience with the ObserverIP, I would not recommend it. The Console in this kit will capture the data send it to AmbientWeather.net and other weather sites like Weatherunderground if you wish. The AmbientWeather Plugin will then get the information from AmbientWeather.net and pull it into HomeSeer.

The Plugin does not communicate with the Weather devices itself.

[ewkearns]

<snip> With out the console you would need another device such as the ObserverIP to gather the data and send it to Ambient Weather or be polled by the Ambient Weather Plugin. My experience with the ObserverIP, I would not recommend it. <snip>

Truly, the ObserverIP can be problematic, but one can create an event to reboot it daily at some given time. Mine would lock up about every 3-4 days (due to memory issues known to Ambient), but once I started rebooting daily, it has been rock solid.

[jim@beersman.com]

Because of the issues I had with the ObserverIP I switched to using the Ecowitt GW1000 device to listen to my AmbientWeather devices. It has been very reliable and also works with the Ecowitt weather devices.

Actually most (but not all) AmbientWeather and Ecowitt weather devices are made by the same company, Fine Offset Electronics. The main difference between to two brands is the firmware. AmbientWeather products only talk to AmbientWeather products and Ecowitt will talk to both.

So anyway, I created a Windows program that can talk with the Ecowitt GW1000 and convert the information to MQTT format. Then using the mcsMQTT plugin populate HomeSeer with the weather data. The only issue would be that you can't send data to AmbientWeather.net website. Ecotwitt has their own site ecowitt.net which I like the layout better than AmbientWeather's site. But Ecowitt does not have an API at this time to pull information back from their website.