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Pollard, from now on you have to include temperature wind direction and windspeed on your posts! You pretty much have the most expensive piece of a weather station. The rest should be easy, a clock, a thermometer, and something for relative humidity, and maybe one of those little white boxes to put them in.

Passing this on. Thirty years ago this would have been something I would have agreed to do. Now, not so much.

From Weather.gov

"Own a Weather Station? We Want Your Data!"

"Do you own a personal home weather station and a computer with a dedicated connection to the Internet, such as fiber, DSL or cable? If you do, the National Weather Service (NWS) and local television meteorologists would love to see your data! The NWS can ingest your frequently-posted weather data into our data and display systems, which can not only improve computer model data (and subsequent weather forecasts) for your area, but also makes the NWS and local television meteorologists aware of micro-climates (unique temperature, wind and precipitation patterns) specific to your local area. (Etc.)

Pardon the dark theme but it's too early for bright white.

Already have a temp/humidity sensor. I need to get a second one so I can have one inside the tunnel and one outside. I'll probably get a rain gauge I can connect to as well since I'll be growing outside the tunnel.

Anything can be logged. This is the last 24 hours but it can log up to 30 days or until the allocated space is full, then the older data gets pushed out. The blank spot is when I had the temp/humidity sensor unplugged for a couple of hours yesterday so I could use the 5 vdc reference voltage to test the wind monitor's wind direction signal.

I'm going to try and get Home Assistant home automation software to read data from the system using Modbus protocol. That way I can collect as much data as I want because it would get saved to my hard drive instead of the built in flash memory of the controller. It would be nice to know how much rain I've had for the year. Home Assistant also has much better graphics/graphs. Once connected, Home Assistant would be able to send commands too.

Some really nice dashboards can be created in Home Assistant with data coming from multiple places. Here's someone's weather dashboard with Weather Underground live radar.

Another one that's pulling in the weather forecast. You can add cameras. I could put a video camera in the tunnel and have Tunnel Vision:)

We Want Your Data!

I'll pass on that.

In fact, I don't plan on having the system connect to the internet at all so I won't be able to pull in the weather forecast etc. I have a laptop I can see that on. Some people go overboard with home automation and have their whole house connected to the web so they can control it remotely with their cell phone. I don't need anyone hacking into my system and closing the tunnel when it's 95 degrees etc. The whole point of automation is to have a self running system. When I get my old solar panels hooked up out there, it will be a self powered system too. Bad storms, when I'll want the tunnel sides to close due to high wind, is also when the power is apt to go out.

I access my system from here - http://192.168.1.5/setup.html and you have to be plugged into the network with an Ethernet cable to get to that url. The capability is there to remotely access it but I'm not doing that. Completely closed local system.

And here I go down the rain gauge - tipping bucket rabbit hole.