Use an old WH1080 weather station with a raspberry pi

I have an old WH1080 weather station and was thinking, “I bet I could wire up a 433MHz receiver to an arduino or raspberry pi and read the wireless sensors to chart the weather data”. I found lots of links for reading the wireless sensors, but then I looked closely at my weather station display and noticed the USB port: I had forgotten that there was a port there! Excellent! Problem solved, and I could solve it without extra hardware!

wh1080

I found a great, oldish blog entry to help me out with the basic steps of reading the data via USB on a raspberry pi. The code dependencies that were manually compiled in that link are now included in the latest raspbian distro (jessie), so those manual compilation steps are no longer necessary.

The basic steps are:

  1. Install python and required dependencies
  2. Install Python software for USB Wireless WeatherStations
  3. Verify WH1080 weather station can be read from raspberry pi (using pywws)
  4. Install a weather station logger (like wfrog or weewx)

I tested both wfrog and weewx (both very capable weather loggers), but decided to stick with the very simple wfrog. Here’s how I did it:

wfrog report

On a sidenote, now that I have graphs and historical sensor data, one interesting thing I noticed is that in the middle of the day, the temperature spikes up to nearly 15˚C, which it most definitely is not. We’ve had some very beautiful and sunny days these past few days in Stockholm, but not that warm… I think I’ll have to move the temperature sensor out of the direct sunlight, and see if that helps prevent these spikes.