Recreating Unobtainium Weather Station Sensors

November 26, 2024 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Imagine you own a weather station. Then imagine that after some years have passed, you’ve had to replace one of the sensors multiple times. Your new problem is that the sensor is no longer available. What does a hacker like [Luca] do? Build a custom solution, of course!

[Luca]’s work concerns the La Crosse WS-9257F-IT weather station, and the repeat failures of the TX44DTH-IT external sensor. Thankfully, [Luca] found that the weather station’s communication protocol had been thoroughly reverse-engineered by [Fred], among others. He then set about creating a bridge to take humidity and temperature data from Zigbee sensors hooked up to his Home Assistant hub, and send it to the La Crosse weather station. This was achieved with the aid of a SX1276 LoRa module on a TTGO LoRa board. Details are on GitHub for the curious.

Luca didn’t just work on the Home Assistant integration, though. A standalone sensor was also developed, based on the Xiao SAMD21 microcontroller board and a BME280 temperature, pressure, and humidity sensor. It too can integrate with the Lacrosse weather station, and proved useful for one of [Luca’s] friends who was in the same boat.

Ultimately, it sucks when a manufacturer no longer supports hardware that you love and use every day. However, the hacking community has a way of working around such trifling limitations. It’s something to be proud of—as the corporate world leaves hardware behind, the hackers pick up the slack!

Arduino Weather-station To Internet Bridge

November 30, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Here’s a project that looks to eliminate the PC necessary for pushing weather station data to the Internet. When you think about it, getting data from your own weather sensing hardware to a site like Weather Underground doesn’t require very much processing at all. The largest chunk of the puzzle is a window to the Internet, and that can be easily accomplished with a microcontroller rather than an always-on computer.

In this case, [Boris Landoni] is using an Arduino along with an RS232 shield and an Ethernet shield. The weather station, a La Crosse WS23xx series, already has an RS232 serial port for grabbing the data. The shield is necessary to step the voltage down to levels that will play nicely with Arduino. It also gives you a D-Sub connector for easy hook up. From there he hit up the documentation for Weather Undeground API, writing code to build the necessary string which is pushed over the Ethernet connection at regular intervals.

If your weather station only offers a USB port you’re not out of luck. Using an embedded platform with USB host functionality you can achieve the same results as we see here.