Been on the hunt for a weather station for a while to integrate with Home Assistant. So far the best I’ve found is Ecowitt - however I’m put off by the requirement to install their app to set it up… my main reason for using HA is to avoid exactly this!
So does anyone have any recommendations for a weather station setup (at least temp, wind and barometric pressure) which I can integrate into HA without being forced to use a third party app or service, and which doesn’t rely on or connect to any cloud services?
I’ve had the " Ambient Weather WS-2902" on my back porch for the past few years and am quite happy with it. It does require use of their app to get things set up: to configure it to use you wifi, and to send it’s data to your local server (which is the “AWNET to HASS” add-on.) But after it’s set up, you don’t need the app, and all data is local, no internet required.
There is a native integration that uses the cloud, but I use the HACS integration that allows fully local access.
I’ll second the Ecowitt recommendation. Ecowitt has a wifi bridge you’ll need to connect the various radio stuff, but it’s tiny and can be powered off USB. When you plug it in, it broadcasts a WiFI SSID to which you can connect on your computer and then use a web browser to get it on your wifi and then connect all the other Ecowitt devices.
There’s a section for connecting to their cloud service that you use to give it a local IP address for either your HA instance running the Ecowitt integration or another system running Ecowitt2MQTT.
I think the Ecowitt is similar - I’m trying to avoid an app at all to be honest though… if there ends up being no alternative I’ll go for it, but I’d like to see if there are options that don’t require anything like that first.
From reading their documentation it seems like you need to use their app for first time setup - is it the case that you can just use a browser to set it up instead?
I’m not entirely sure how recommending a completely analogue system is useful on the Home Assistant forum… given this is where I’m posting, I would have thought it pretty obvious I’m looking for something that integrates with HA…
I don’t have the app on my phone, and I don’t remember ever downloading it. Here’s the one I have:
and the documentation for that one.
Note at the bottom of the first page it says, " If you are unable to configure the device network settings using the mobile app, we recommend using the SETUP Via Embedded Web page on next page." The next page has the web only setup instructions.
Just putting ‘it’ out there… many years ago I used to manage a weather station for the village in which I live. I found that Cumulus software was very good, and flexible, and seemed to work with a variety of weather stations - even handling automated Social Media uploads too. It must be 10+ years since I last dealt with it, but I do remember it positively - whether it can be integrated into HA is beyond me, but a lot of the data it used for logging was readily available for uploading to weather pages in HTML.
Hmm - I don’t think so? But I’ve not tried to use both integrations.
In the configuration of the Ambient device, I have it sending the data to both Weather Underground and the local HA add-on server. So the native integration isn’t required if that’s what you’re after. Or, of course, you can configure it to not send to Weather Underground (or other web services) if you don’t want that.
I don’t think you can really use both. On the Ecowitt you have to point the API to either a local server or their cloud server. You can’t (at least as far as I recall) have the API info sent two places. So if you point the Ecowitt to their cloud service, you need to use the cloud integration. If you point to a local server, the HACS integration IS that local server.
Thanks also @Muddy_Boots - I have probably maxed out my connectivity with the AmbientWeather WS-2902C anyway… I have Weewx running on an RPI4 that uses the “customized” connection available from the Console, but also from that same weewx I transmit data to the following websites, then daemons that make rest API calls to various sensors I have in HA on a separate RPI5 running HAOS in a VM as shown in the below dashboard snippet. I have noticed the interval is not always 16 seconds, it is actually 32 seconds most of the time (there may be a timing issue where some ofd the transmissions from the array to the console are delayed - or a network issue I haven’t figured out yet). I had to also put some goofy logic in there so the RPI4 repeatedly tries to reconnect to the RPI5 so it is able to reconnect and continuously work properly when either of them come back online after a network issue or either are rebooted:
