Weather Station

5 Dec 2025 · Temp · Wind · Rain

My overengineered thermometer

I'm interssted in weather. I guess as a Brit having an interest in the weather is part of my DNA. I've had an Accurite weather station for a while, it has an inside screen with a few sensors and an outside thermometer. I was constantly frustrated that I could sniff the packets from the outdoor sensor, but wasn't ever able to do anything with the data from the screen in the kitchen. Also the outside sensor chewed through batteries.

One of my friends is also interested in weather (again, not a huge surprise he's the same age as me and has other similar interests) well the other day he told me about a new weather station he had bought. An Ecowitt 7-in-1 device, the bit that really tickled my fancy was the gateway that it came with. It has an API. I recently celebrated a milestone anniversary at work, they gave me some Amazon vouchers to celebrate. You can see where this is going.

A couple of days later this arrived.

Compared with some of the houses in the UK, I live in a new house. It's 17 years old, but bigger picture, it's new. Therefore it's far too close to my neighbours houses. Wall to wall it's about 3m between me and my neighbours one way and 1.5m between me and next door's garage the other (this is weather station related, honest, I'm not just moaning about modern building practices). This means it's next to impossible to get a ladder up to get up to the roof. When I mounted my white stick antenna, I had to get an aerial man to use ropes and climbing harnesses to mount it. So getting it on the roof is a job for future. For the time being the outdoor unit is on an L pole on my shed.

WS90 Outdoor Unit

The outdoor unit is a multi tiered cylinder, it's about 210x95mm and is made from hard plastic. The upper section is a haptic rain sensor, ultrasonic wind speed sensor, solar pannel & sunlight sensor. The middle section is the battery box & brains of the operation. The lower section is the temperature, pressure & humidity sensor.

Solar Panel — Rain sensor & solar panel.

There's an optional heating plate, luckily in the UK minus temperatures are few and far between, so there's no need for me to have to figure out how to get a power feed to it! It runs on 2 x AA batteries, the solar panel charges up a capacitor array that works with the batteries to power the unit. Ecowitt suggest with regular sun the batteries last years. Mine has been up on the shed for about a week, we've not had any sunny days, there has been a couple where it hasn't rained all day, and the capacitors have charged from 0 to 2.6V, the batteries have dropped by 0.02V. It's only on the shed, so changing batteries isn't an issue, I do plan on roof mounting it, after testing the caps & solar charging works.

The unit is well put together, well sealed and nicely finished. It fits on a standard 1" aerial pole.

HP2564 Indoor Display

The internal display is a 180mm (7") colour screen with a swing up temperature & pressure sensor and 8 touch sensitive buttons along the bottom edge.

When you power up the unit you connect it to the Ecowitt app and then give it access to your IoT WiFi. You create an account on ecowitt.net and before you know it live weather data is flowing from you to the rest of the world. Then make a Wunderground account and push it up there too. In the app there's a weather map created by showing all the public weather stations that push data to Ecowitt. The map is a place where it's easy to spend hours! The display doesn't expose an API locally, so you can't grab data directly from it, you have to scrape it from the Ecowitt website.

GW3000 Gateway

The gateway allows you to connect a bunch of other sensors and it has its own API that I intend to use to push data to the homepage on our smart TVs. Right now I'm using it to push the temperature of my office up to this website. I've ordered a couple of other indoor temperature sensors to keep track of the temperatures round the house.

The setup is a bit of a faff, rather than the gateway catching everything and sending it all up to the cloud as tagged output, it creates itself as a new device with different sensors, so you end up with 2 markers on the temperature map and a faff getting API access to the different readings (more on that shortly)

The gateway looks all banged up in the picture, the flash is highlighting it way more than is noticable in real life. The unit is 97x60x23mm, it weighs about 100gr, its got a temperature & humidity sensor on a flying lead and a little 833MHz antenna on the side which recieves the data from the outside unit much better than the screen does when it's up in th'office. At the minute it's just floating about on my desk, when I'm finished messing with it I'll wall mount it and vanish the cables.

Getting the data to m0mnf.com

This should have been a nice simple job, ask the API for the data from display (it speaks to the outdoor sensor) and grab the office temp from the gateway. I want to display both the outdoor data, the kitchen window ledge temp and the office temp on a website dashboard. I want the data from the gateway in my LAN so I can display it on the TVs as well as the family calendar and a few other bits.

The API doesn't let you differentiate between devices when you poll it for data. So you have to make two API calls, 1 with the MAC address of the screen for kitchen & outside data and 1 with the MAC address of the gateway for the temperature in my office. Then manipulate the returned JSON to show both temperatures. This is way more faffy than it should be. Maybe I have a weird use case? I don't understand the logic of 1 set of indoor temperature data overwriting the other? Anyway, after some faffing I got it to work the way I wanted it to.

The link is here if you want to look at the temperatures in and around casa tiggy.

Thoughts

I'm chuffed to bits with the weather station and the webpage I've knocked together with it. The units I have are well made and good quality. The app is decent and the weather map is a joy to behold. I'm looking forward to the other sensors coming and wrestling with the API again! It's a worthy replacement for the old Accurite station (which lives on in the garage) and I'm pleased I got it.