I just purchased a
Davis Instruments 6250 Vantage Vue on Amazon. My current weather setup started showing signs of sensor failure this weekend, first with the humidity sensor and then with the rain sensor. This setup is about 5 to 6 years old so it is probably about time to replace it. I was somewhat annoyed with the purchase since I have to purchase a $129 component in order to interface the readout with a Raspberry Pi USB port. That is outrageous! From what I know, the Davis Instruments provides the best customer service that is out there for most medium capability weather stations, so I decided to bite the bullet and pay the price. The sensor unit is self contained and has a solar panel for power (i.e., it will save trips to the roof to change the batteries). The picture of the unit looks like this (from the Amazon site):
From what I understand of the unit, it has high praise, being rated 4.5 out of 5 overall out of 306 reviews. The unit looks clean so it will not be an eyesore being mounted on my chimney.
Current plans are to sample the information coming across the USB line from the Vue with the RPi, process/archive the data, and then send response to Weather Underground/WeatherBugNet.
Update: apparently the software of choice here would be WeeWx (
http://www.weewx.com). The Davis Vantage Vue is supported, as is uploads to Weather Underground and CWOP (interface to Weather Channel). I was not able to figure out how to be a part of WeatherBug network; it seems that is closed to PWS implementations. Anyway, good information to know.
