I was going to show you my old weather station, a venerable beast from Oregon Scientific that is quite good at this sort of thing. But alas, as soon as I took it off the wall it disappeared to wherever Phil's Old Stuff disappears. (It was basically an older, less sexy version of this.
So. Time for something new, something connected, and something definitely more modern.
A quick search of ye olde internet consistently returned offerings from Netatmo. The company's products haven't changed a lot over the years, which actually is a good thing in this case. So that's the direction my credit card was pointed.
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Thoughts on Netatmo Weather Station
The basics: The standard Netatmo Weather Station comes with a relatively small indoor sensor and an outdoor sensor. They look, well, like silver cans. The indoor one measures temperature and humidity, and sound level and carbon dioxide levels. The outdoor sensor does temperature, pressure and humidity. They connect to your smartphone, and connect to each other. Note that there's no external display here — you have to use a phone or tablet or computer or something to actually get data.
There are two additional modules that can be connected — a rain gauge, which I grabbed because Florida, and a wind gauge, which I didn't get because I don't that much about how breezy it is.
Setup was as simple as you'd expect for this sort of thing — you just follow the instructions in the app. I've used it with Android and on iOS — but there's also a Windows phone app, as well. The web interface may be my favorite of the bunch, actually, because it's full of features and nicely designed. Finally, I settled on the third-party app Baratmo for my Mac menu bar.
So now I have access to all my weather information — inside and out. I can get to it from anywhere and in more detail than what even my $250 Nest thermostat provides. (By the way: Netatmo is a "Works with Nest" device, but you can tie it in via third-party services like IFTTT.)
What's missing? Not a whole lot. But I do miss having a single place at home where I can see all this info at one time. As much as I loathed that aging LCD display, it did its job without complaint. So I'm hoping someone builds a "skill" for it to work with the upcoming Amazon Echo Show. And I'd like a little more historical data — how much rain did I get in the last week versus just the last day, for example.
Strictly from a data standpoint, this has been a good purchase.
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