So I'm just trying to source the equipment for my first weather station and when trying to checkout at Ecowitt's store, the US is no longer an option when selecting the shipping address? Shipping Policy still indicates shipping to the states, though. The Chatbot was stumped and I do have an inquiry to their support email, but wondering if anyone in the US has bought anything from them lately.
🌩️ WeatherDesk v3.0.5 is out — and your Tempest is no longer required.
📥 Grab v3.0.5 (installers for Windows, macOS, Linux .deb, Android APK, and Docker):
👉 https://github.com/d4vid87/weatherdesk/releases/tag/v3.0.5
⚡ Radar is powered by our sibling project, Hook Echo-WX — a from-scratch NEXRAD Level II renderer in Rust:
👉 https://github.com/d4vid87/hookecho
WeatherDesk is a free, self-hosted weather desk that runs on YOUR machine, reads YOUR station, and answers to nobody's ad network. Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, Docker. No account. No subscription. No "premium tier" hiding the radar behind a paywall.
What's new in 3.0.5:
🛰️ Bring your own station — any brand. The big one. WeatherDesk used to speak Tempest and only Tempest. Now it ingests Ecowitt, Ambient Weather, Davis (WeatherLink Live), AcuRite (via rtl_433), La Crosse, KestrelMet, and any generic Weather Underground-protocol console. Point your console's "custom server" at WeatherDesk and every gauge, chart, trend, alert, and CWOP upload lights up exactly like a Tempest does — because it all converts at the door.
🌍 No station at all? Still works. Type in a location and WeatherDesk pulls a full forecast, hero card, hourly, and 10-day for free. Your own sensor just overlays on top when you have one.
📱 The Desk fits a phone now. Real layout on small screens instead of a squashed desktop.
🔔 Notification spam is dead. Forecast-change alerts fired repeatedly for the same change. Fixed.
🖱️ Panel drag-resize behaves. Panels no longer creep bigger every time you touch a corner.
Why anyone should care: live radar with velocity, storm-relative velocity, VIL, echo tops, and hail probability. NWS warning polygons with the full warning text. 10-day, alert center, model agreement (GFS/ECMWF/ICON/GEM side by side), air quality, sun & moon, station health, records, and a searchable weather archive. Trends and history live in a local database on your own disk — nobody rents your weather back to you.
Free. Open source. Runs on your hardware. Pull requests and bug reports welcome. 🌪️
What it says:
Contacted support, they confirmed failure, offered a 50% discount on a new unit. I'm kind of torn since I think this is the best-designed weather station on the market in terms of capability and simplicity (NOT reliability), but not sure I want to spend another $175 on something I can't trust.
What's the closest alternative offering the full suite of capabilities + app + simplicity the Tempest offers?
I'd love to get a Davis station, but they don't offer lightning detection and seem woefully behind the curve. ($425 for WeatherLink Console?? what am I missing???)
Cursory search leads me to the Ambient Weather WS-5000, which seems like it's a rebranded Ecowitt.
I am trying to buy the First Real-Time Air Quality Monitor for Temirtau, Kazakhstan.
Temirtau is widely recognized as one of the most polluted cities in Kazakhstan. Despite this, the city currently has no publicly accessible, community-operated real-time air quality monitor connected to the global IQAir network. Residents mostly rely on satellite-derived model estimates rather than direct measurements.
I'm raising funds to install an IQAir AirVisual Outdoor Monitor (432$) in the center of Temirtau. The monitor will provide continuous, hyper-local measurements of PM2.5, PM10, and other environmental data, with readings available online 24/7.
buymeacoffee.com/air.temirtau/help-bring-first-real-time-air-quality-monitor-temirtau-kazakhstan
After going through hundreds of threads on r/myweatherstation and other weather enthusiast communities, I put together a quick cheat sheet for anyone as lost as I was:
🏆 Best overall for accuracy? → WeatherFlow Tempest Weather Station
🟢 Best for total beginners? → Ambient Weather WS-2902
⭐️ Best premium pick? → Davis Vantage Vue with WeatherLink Console
📦 Best enclosed value pick? → Ecowitt Wittboy Weather Station GW2001
🏠 Best for indoor monitoring? → La Crosse Technology C85845-INT
Personally going with the WeatherFlow Tempest Weather Station - best accuracy and reliability for local weather data from everything I've read.
I’m considering a home weather station because weather apps often do not match what is happening at my house, especially for rainfall, wind, and temperature. I’m not a serious meteorology hobbyist, but I would like reliable local readings and a setup that does not become another project to maintain.
Budget: Around $200–$400, though I could stretch for a meaningful improvement in accuracy and durability.
What I want:
Options I keep seeing:
I’m mainly unsure whether a Tempest is accurate enough for someone who cares about local rain and wind data, or whether it is worth spending more for an Ambient Weather or Davis setup with more traditional sensors. Reviews suggest that approximately $200–$400 is the usual range for a reasonably accurate, durable home weather station, while more advanced prosumer systems can cost $500–$700 or more.
What home weather station has been reliable for you over several seasons, and which brands or models would you avoid?
I've been working on this for the last couple weeks after and finally have my Home Assistant-based local weather channel to a point where I'm pretty happy with it with a few tweaks and optimization trials still in the works. Nobody I know seems to find it interesting but I'm here in the hopes it can get some love.
It runs continuously on a small Linux mini-PC and cycles through dashboard views for current conditions, a 7-day forecast, local and Southeast radar, two weather cameras, NWS alerts, and a sun/moon/rainfall almanac. I've developed an optimized system that uses a combination of NWS/METAR data along with home data captured through an Ecowitt WS90 which feeds the appropriate fields.
A few of the more interesting pieces:
The dashboard YAML alone is approaching 9,000 lines and the entire project takes up around 2GB on the mini-PC.
NOTE: Some of the screenshots use simulated conditions so I could test/display things like snow, flash flooding and tornado warnings without having to wait for Georgia weather to provide them. That's why some of the associated figures and short term forecast don't fit the conditions indicated. Eventually I'll look to replace the generative backgrounds with curated real images, but these work for now.
Still tinkering with it, but it's become a fun experience learning about Home Assistant. Can't wait to eventually move everything away from Amazon/Google for actual automations at home and beyond!
I’ve been using my Tempest for a while, could anyone recommend an app for iOS, I’m happy with the Tempest app but would like to find something that is a little more ’polished’
I’ve been using my Tempest for a while, could anyone recommend an app for iOS, I’m happy with the Tempest app but would like to find something that is a little more ’polished’
Took down my old post as I had to do some maintenance on my weather station, but it is back live! I noticed there was no accurate weather station on the Pend Oreille Long Bridge & wanted to change that. I built a custom LoRa ESP32 Weather Station which tracks Temperature, Humidity, Wind Speed, Wind Direction, Rain, Air Quality & Barometric Pressure. You can access it here:
432lx at the partial totality then the lx rises after the moon clears the sun, then the lx falls again at sunset.
Hi everyone! I'm looking for testers for Jacket, a weather app that adapts its own forecast to how you interact with the weather.
I got the idea from noticing that I respond to weather differently than my friends and relatives do. For example, I could be overheating in the same weather where my parents would feel cold and need a sweater. Conventional weather apps are still too static to take this account – they just show numbers and even the "feels like" features aren't actually personalized.
Jacket's core goals are:
It is released on the iOS app store already, with Android in beta testing and releasing soon. I would highly appreciate any feedback or suggestions! Check it out here: https://jacketweather.app/
Thanks!
Live in the middle of Alaska. Winter gets down to -55F. I need an API enabled weather station or thermometer that can go lower than -60F (-51C) So far all I can find are units that go to -40F. That is just another day that ends in a Y for Alaska.
Last winter I helped with an online nature camera watching Alaskan birds in deep cold. We pulled weather data from AccuWeather and displayed it as an overlay. Often the local readings at the camera feeding station were lower than what AccuWeather was reporting. (We have an AccuRite digital rated to -58F) Conclusion is displaying our own data would be more accurate.
I have spent days looking at weather stations. The lowest specifications are not easy to find since stations have lots of probe options. -40F seems the lowest. This would support why all the AccuWeather data was off if CWOP stations are limited to -40F
I know from previous experience all electronics are rated to -40F because that is the lowest the freezers at Underwriters Laboratories go.
Emailed technical support at Ambient Weather and ACCuRite. Both confirmed -40f was the lowest their stations would go. Ambient said theirs would still read below -40F but accuracy would be poor.
Anyone knowing of an API enabled weather station or thermometer that goes to -60F/-51C – the info would be much appreciated.
Hi
I’ve recently refreshed the batteries in my weather station and base station and now it won’t connect.
I’ve tried to reset, repair, power down for 15 minutes and power back up but still nothing.
The base station provides indoor data but the areas of the LCD screen for the outdoor data just flash / cycle as shown in the video.
Any suggestions on how to re-pair please?
Looking around the map on the ambient phone app, and noticed my neighbor has different tiles for rain and wind. Does anyone know how he got these? I looked around and couldn't figure out how to get them. Are they part of ambient weather + subscription, or 3rd party?
The official Netatmo app is functional but loveless, so I spent the past months building my own. Sharing it here because I’m curious what you think, and whether this is something other weather station owners would even want.
The core idea: if you own a weather station, you have something no weather app has: measured data from your own garden, going back years. AURA puts that data front and center and only uses a public weather service (Open-Meteo) for the one thing the station can’t know: the forecast.
- The top half is a scene, not a wallpaper. A MeshGradient sky whose palette shifts with the time of day (night, blue hour, golden hour, day, computed from actual sun positions at the station’s location) and with the weather (rain desaturates it, fog flattens everything, thunder darkens it). The sun sits at its real position: low left in the morning, high at noon, sinking behind the hill silhouettes in the evening. At night a moon travels the same arc. Overcast? The sun fades to a glow behind the cloud deck.
- The data lives in a sheet that slides over the scene. At rest you only see the essentials: big temperature, one written outlook sentence, the curve. Scrolling reveals the rest, and only then does the tab bar appear.
- The temperature curve blends measured and forecast: the past (own station, solid line) flows into the forecast (dotted) at “now”. The dotted line starts from the last measured point, not from the first model value, otherwise you’d see the model-vs-sensor offset as a kink.
- The written outlook is one auto-generated sentence: “Dry for another 2 hours, around 4 mm near 22:00. Cooler tomorrow: high of 17.” Thresholds keep every model drizzle from announcing itself as a storm.
- Bento tiles with mini visualizations: wind compass, pressure arc gauge, hourly rain bars, humidity, dew point. Each one opens a detail view with history.
The other tabs (screenshots 4 to 6): a calendar heatmap of your own measurements, full charts per sensor with scrubbing, and a records tab that gamifies your station: hottest and coldest ever, warmest night, strongest gust, season counters and milestones (“15.2° to go until the record”).
- SwiftUI, iOS 26, zero external dependencies. Swift Charts for all graphs, MeshGradient for the sky, Liquid Glass materials for the cards (configurable: off / subtle / full).
- Backend is a single Node.js file (deliberately no npm dependencies) in Docker on a Mac mini. It polls the Netatmo API phase-locked: the station publishes every ~10 minutes, the poller learns that rhythm and queries right after each new measurement. Fresh data without burning the API budget.
- Served over the home network or Tailscale when away, with automatic failover.
- Notifications go through a self-built push relay (AppDaemon script talking straight to APNs over HTTP/2 with JWT). No Firebase, no third-party push service.
- Sideload/TestFlight only. No App Store plans for now.
Honest caveats: it’s built for one specific setup (Netatmo plus a home server), making it generic would be real work, and it’s iOS 26 only. The screenshots show live data from the actual station in Belgium.
It’s 40°C where we are right now, but the heat isn't what worries me most: it’s the invisible UV exposure.
With three young kids, guessing whether the UV index is at a safe 2 or a dangerous 9 isn't an option, and bad sunburns early in life double the risk of skin damage later on.
I tried using standard weather apps, but they hide the UV index under layers of forecasts, menus, and ads. I needed to see peak UV risk instantly without digging around.
So I built a simple, no-frills tool. You open it and immediately get two things:
No clutter, no bloat, no sign-ups. Just the UV facts you need when you're outside with your family.
Sharing it here in case it helps keep your kids safe this summer too. Protect their skin, check the UV index, and don't forget the hats! ☀️🧴👶