I was going to show you my old weather station — a venerable beast from Oregon Scientific, which 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. (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. They 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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The basics: The standard Netatmo Weather Station comes 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 and 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 care quite that much about just 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 an honest-to-goodness Windows Phone app as well. The web interface may be my favorite of the bunch, actually, full of features and nicely designed. And finally I've 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. And 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. I do miss having a single place at home where I can see all this info at one time. For 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.
But strictly from a data standpoint? This has been a good purchase.
