u/sakawae

I've been working on getting updates to WeatherUnderground (https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/KPACHEST97) , CWOP, and PWSweather from my Davis weather system. I have a Vantage Pro2 Plus, but the newer tablet-like weatherlink console that prevents USB logging. I don't want to pay money on a monthly basis for access to data that I feel I already own (I own the instruments!).

So I bought an RTL-SDR blog v3 dongle to intercept the RF signal. Davis uses a 915 MHz signal with frequency hopping in a band from 902 to 928 MHz. I found out that this is also where my water utility's meters broadcast at (and can read everyone's meters, that doesn't seem secure).

Through the magic of ChatGPT, Claude (and in the end, a lot of Claude), keyword searches, persistence, wxforum.net, and the Google weewx-user group, I was able to get the dongle to sense the Davis RF signal, follow its hops, and then send that data decoded for recording and sending off to services at faster refresh rates than what Davis allows. This was done using rtldavis (many thanks to Vince for putting this together and being so helpful on forums) and weewx.

I was successful getting it to run on a MacBook, and came close on a Win 11 Pro PC using WSL (an Ubuntu install, maybe I should have gone Debian). This failed because of some weird issue with USB. Ultimately, I have it running on a Synology NAS in a container, which was my real goal.

I am not a programmer by profession, though I have compiled things in Linux in my distant past. But with a little human help and AI guidance, I did get it working as well as I had hoped. If anyone here finds this at all interesting, it is doable! Happy to help, and I am trying to figure out if any of what I have done would be useful to share somewhere like github or docker. Advice very welcome!

I picked up a Timemore Blackmirror Basic 3.0 on Alibaba for just over 30 bucks. My very first purchase there, I figured what could go wrong? 30 bucks I learn a cheap lesson. Or I get a quality scale for super cheap.

Well, after just over two weeks, it got here from China (all delays stateside with the courier, btw). First off, this seems like a great scale. I own an Acaia Pearl S as my daily driver, and find it reliable, but finicky in control. The Timemore will likely suffer from similar issues with capacitive touch sensors, but it was less than 20% of the price. It has flow rate, controls works pretty well, reproducibility seems good.

Accuracy is off. I have calibrations weights, and see that there is a clear linear bias that creates a very small systemic error. I'd like to correct for this like I have on my Acaia (reads dead on after initial calibration 2 months on, after many many brews). I see the directions for the Blackmirror 2.0, but those aren't working for the 3.0.

Any Timemore gurus out there? Any reps from the company? I can't figure out how to get into calibration mode.