I have recently purchased an Ecotwitt Wittboy to solve some local weather information stuff (mainly wind sensor for use in automations).
While I am more or less satisfied with the product as a whole, I tried to eliminate any communication of the device outside of my local network.
Therefore, I have put the gateway on a VLAN group including my HA server but not my internet router.
However, I found, that after a while the connection between the Wittboy and HA has been lost and no sensor values had been transmitted any longer.
Once I include the internet router in the VLAN, the transmissions seems to be constant.
As a plan b, I tried to block URLs contacted by the Wittboy with Pi-hole.
It seems as if the Wittboy mainly contacts an OTA firmware server from ecowitt and a ntp server, which should be fine i guess.
But, there is still one thing I am worried about:
In the local network section of the webui, a static DNS server is set to 205.171.3.65.
I did try to change it, but it always reverts itself to that address.
I was hoping to use the Ecowitt Wittboy as a mere offline sensor submitting to HA. These seemst to be not possible though.
Do you have an ideas how to achieve that?