What's The Weather? Searching For An Internet Tether

For the first half-year that I owned this place up in the Tahoe Sierras, my primary residence was still down in the flatlands of Sacramento. In addition to being able to monitor and control the then-secondary-residence from a few hours down the freeway, I aspired to be able to supplement my monitoring of sites like Weather.com and Weather Underground with Internet-accessible real-time measurements of wind speed and direction, outside temperature and other weather-related data right at the house. That’s because the published local weather conditions tend to come from measurements taken at the airport or other locations near downtown. Although I’m only a few miles’ drive away from Truckee’s nexus, I’m more than 1,000 feet higher in elevation, a factor which can substantially alter the conditions here versus there.

Unfortunately, in spite of abundant Google research, I was unable to stumble across a weather station with a built-in web server that, by making appropriate ‘holes’ in my router’s firewall, I could access over the Internet. This situation surprised (and two years later, still surprises) me, given how ‘Net-connected an increasing number of consumer-targeted electronics devices of all types are becoming. This seems to be an untapped market opportunity ripe for some brave entrepreneur to exploit in a cost-effective manner; then again, I may just not be aware of products that fit the description, in which case I welcome your feedback.

I was prompted to write about this particular topic at this particular time by the fact that today’s Woot! is a Thermor BIOS Weather Station (instruction manual PDF) for $59.99:

Published reviews of the unit are mixed, as are comments from Woot! community members. For one thing, the 433 MHz wireless transmitter relies exclusively on AA batteries that drain fast and aren’t solar-rechargeable (although hardware hackers have reportedly figured out how to add this capability). Also, the receiver-side software supplied by the manufacturer is Windows-only, although enthusiast-developed offerings for Linux and OS X are under development. And as mentioned above, the unit can’t directly connect to my router (therefore to the Internet).

However, the price tag is tempting. And I suppose that I could always indirectly view the data by connecting to my Windows laptop over a protocol such as VNC, VPN (i.e. Hamachi, etc) or Windows Remote Desktop Connection. Your thoughts, folks?

Followup: More on weather monitoring kits from MAKE Magazine.