Got one of these weather stations for my birthday earlier this week:
Bought from Maplin (code N96FY) its known as the USB wireless weather forecaster. I believe its also sold by others under different names such the watson W8681 (or W-8681) but they all seem to be manufactured by Chinese company Fine Offset Electronics with a product id of WH1081.
System components
Unit consists of the outdoor sensor array (rainfall, pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction) and an indoor display unit that also measures temperature and humidity. The two are connected using an 868MHz wireless link (for the UK).
The indoor receiver unit has a touch screen LCD display of all the received parameters coupled with a little bit of forecasting display – predominantly based on the pressure readings.
The receiver also has a USB port so that you can download the data collected to a PC running Windows (seems MAC and Linux are not supported out of the box). The USB connectivity, for me at least, is a very useful feature and differentiates it from the other units sold by Maplin.
Build quality
The outdoor sensor array looks rather cheap and nasty, made from a grey plastic with RJ11 type plugs and cable to connect the sensors through to the array transmitter unit. The unit is quoted as being IPX3 (rain proof) – we’ll see what the current cold winter and snow does to it over the next few weeks.
The indoor unit is quite large and easy to read with a backlight that illuminates the screen when the touch screen is pressed. Screen contrast was initially a bit poor but I found out that if you touch the time portion of the screen once, you get presented with a range of 8 contrast levels – I have cranked it up to the full level 8 and its much easier to read now.
Setup
Once setup with initial dates and times, the system is ready to go – the whole build and setup process took no more than 20 minutes – without reading the manual.
Web connectivity
As I mentioned earlier, USB connectivity to a computer was the feature that made this unit stand out. The unit comes supplied with software on CD to allow you to download the data from the unit and display it with an impressive array of gauges. Personally I didn’t bother with any of that and shot straight over to sandaysoft to download his excellent piece of software called cumulus.
This software will download the data from the USB port of the receiver and then upload it to a choice of web destinations.
What do you think ?
In my case I chose to upload it to my own website using the predefined presentation template. You can see the results here.
Its early days but the unit seems to be reasonably accurate although wind direction is difficult as you can see the swirling effect probably caused by the sensor currently being located in the lawn of my enclosed suburban garden. The next weekend will have it hoisted up onto my shed roof.
