Weather Stations

We are using Davis Vantage 2 weather stations connected to Raspberry Pi and other linux computers running WeeWx to collect weather data. This open source software provides many hardware interfaces already, and is extensible.

In cases where we have internet connectivity we use an Influx plugin or MQTT plugin to send to InfluxDB. The preferred approach is to send all data through LoRaWAN to TTN so there is only one pipeline to maintain.

The Davis Vantage weather stations are no longer supported by the company, but still work well and can be used for a while longer.

Balena

We manage data acquisition device fleets with Balena and Docker. Balena handles internet connectivity and provisioning, and Docker is used to build the images that are deployed to the devices.

For ease of use, it is recommended that any Raspberry Pi devices be 3B+ or later, since these work on 5Ghz wireless networks. This will ensure that the connection is faster enough for remote command line access and iterative updates. SD cards used in the RPi should be at least 128GB to allow plenty of room for larger Docker images, as well as data storage.