@toxic0berliner to answer your questions here too:
I haven’t created a discussion thread yet, will do so after the next update of the integration. Still have some things planned for it that I want to see working better. Including a much better explanation on what that switch in the setup actually does. And the possiblity to reconfigure that later.
And in regards to the indoor values. Sadly the stations dont seem to be passing that along to the cloud. So it won’t be possible to intercept and redirect that to HomeAssistant. Not much can be done. I have the appropriate mappings available, so if the station reports them they would end up in HomeAssistant. The mappings come from the official API documentation and some other reverse engineered projects.
That weather station will come with all the hardware needed to transmit directly to ecowitt2mqtt. You will use Ambient Weather’s wsnet app to make that configuration.
So did any one actualy answer the initial question ? I am on the market to find a weather station with rain / wind sensor and local access / home assistant intergration.
I checked the conversation but I see no obvious advice which (still available) set I should buy.
I’ve had the " Ambient Weather WS-2902" on my back porch for the past few years and am quite happy with it (though I doubt it’s the “best possible” device… )
There is a native integration that uses the cloud, but I use the HACS integration that allows fully local access.
I bought an ecowitt gwa2000 base station plus a ws90 weather station via aliexpress. There is an HA Integration which just works, and you can add many extra sensors. The unique selling point for me was ‘no moving parts’.
Fair warning for those who live in areas where it gets below freezing - the heater on those was poorly thought out:
It does not keep the solar cells clear, just the ultrasonics. This results in the lux sensor becoming nonfunctional due to ice on top. Worse, it seems as though the heater is just enough to occasionally melt and refreeze snow into ice on top - in some cases resulting in it taking longer to clear than without the heater!
When operational in still/calm cold conditions it can result in a significant temperature offset - the heater is too close to the temperature sensor. Worse, this isn’t consistent - it appears to depend somewhat on wind and snow/ice.
I pointed that out to them and they send a replacement temp sensor assembly which does seem to solve most of that problem, though it requires the latest firmware (which you can flash yourself if you have a pc or mac).
The icing elsewhere I can’t talk to, since I don’t look at the lux sensor much.
I recently bought & set up an Ecowitt HP2561 and can confirm the HA integration works and the entire setup was local - no account, no app, just local. Note that the integration is inthe HA core. There is a now unsupported custom integration (in HACS) that is non-functional. MQTT not needed, the weather station talks to the wifi gateway (display) and the gateway provides rhe data to the HA entitias (2.4GHz only).
For me, the apparent_temperature entity isn’t created (feels_like is, but it’s not much use for me). Windchill entity is not reporting (haven’t investigated that yet).
My personal experiences have been when buy things that have “Engrish” instructions you generally pay for it in multiple ways with your time after the fact. I’d be interested what choices you make and what your success is later on as a weather station is one of the things I want to add to my own setup.
)