A few years ago, I set up two weather stations. More recently, with me being stuck at home, I’ve made some tweaks and enhancements. I’ve invested some time in trying to figure out what I’d do if  I had to do it over again. So, in addition to improving the setup, I’m going to work on enhancing it.

At the moment, in one location, I’m using the Acurite Atlas weather station. The Acurite equipment is designed to be used with their station, or internet connected system, but I  do not do that. When I first started, I also used Acurite temperature sensors hooked into my Home Assistant instance to track internal temperature. But I’ve since dismantled that system and replaced it with a combination of other sensors.

Acurite is known as a low-end hobbyist brand, and while  there were some criticism with the accuracy of the Acurite 5-in-1 sensor, which I still use  in  one of my stations, the Atlas offers better accuracy and  several additional sensors.

All Acurite equipment transmits using a 433MHz radio, which can be picked up by a USB software defined radio  and  a program called RTL_433.  I’ve run this on a Raspberry Pi, and sent to a more robust system for storage There are alternative weather stations, which offer different ways to get the data, but the important part for me is to be able to get the data, because then I can do things with it, such as upload it to third party servers, display it, etc.

In future posts, I am going to get into more detail on how I set this up and what I’ve learned.