For Christmas I decided I would like my own weather station. I knew that I wanted it to upload the data to the cloud so that I could see trends and access the information from anywhere.
I did a fair amount of research and settled on what I wanted, but the UK company wanted to charge me about £45 on top of an already steep price just to ship it to the Isle of Man! This seemed a little bit excessive, especially as they were only shipping by Royal Mail, so I decided to look elsewhere.
I came across a website supplying a whole host of Youshiko branded weather stations. I couldn’t find much information about these online, and suspected they would be of dubious quality, but took a punt anyway.
I was pleasantly surprised. The build quality isn’t *that* bad, and everything worked first time and was easy to set up. The external sensors are powered by AA cells, and use an 868 MHz link to the mains powered indoor display unit. This unit then connects over WiFi to my LAN so that it can send the data on to two popular online weather sites.
The internal unit has a web server built in, so it was easy to add the necessary API keys for the online services. Data was flowing from my back garden to the internet within minutes of powering the thing up for the first time.
Accuracy seems OK for the price. Both the local temperature and atmospheric pressure agree well with the Ronaldsway Meteorological Office, at EGNS. My device was even sensitive enough to capture the pressure shockwave from a volcanic eruption about 10 thousand miles away!
I suspect the Manx wind and rain will finish off the outdoor unit within a year or so, but time will tell. Certainly it’s not a serious weather station, but for casual hobbyist use I would recommend these as easy to use and accurate, with the ability to upload to the cloud.
You can see the data for yourself by visiting: https://app.weathercloud.net/d9291168946#current