Putting a Dumb Weather Station on the Internet
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
colincogle.nameTechstory
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IOTWeather StationDiyHam Radio
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IOT
Weather Station
Diy
Ham Radio
The author shares their project of connecting a cheap weather station to the internet using a software-defined radio and APRS protocol, sparking discussion on DIY weather stations and IoT projects.
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- 01Story posted
Oct 7, 2025 at 3:11 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Oct 13, 2025 at 3:40 AM EDT
6d after posting
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36 comments in 132-144h
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Oct 15, 2025 at 11:22 AM EDT
3 months ago
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ID: 45507444Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:09:11 PM
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http://www.wxqa.com/
I had a station for a few years. The receiver had a usb interface so no software radio required. I used weewx to import the data. I even had a water temperature sensor off the end of my dock so I could see if the lake was warm enough to swim in.
https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/
Interesting to see that it gets many submissions from outside UK too
> At this point, we've connected the Temu weather station to the Internet and the ham radio network. Anyone with an APRS-enabled radio, digipeater, receiver, or just a web browser can see what the temperature and humidity are at my house.
Also, the temperature measurement is probably not accurate to 2 decimal places, but the "toot" converts 7.2 C to 44.96 F. Someone needs to learn about significant digits.
the device is restarted, if the new firmware is working correctly you signal the update process that everything is all right and it sets the new partition as default.
if the device doesn't boot correctly, or your sanity checks don't pass, either you or the watchdog restarts the device and it boot from the known-working partition.
Flashing the firmware of a cheap IoT device remotely OTA is not without risk.
Well, in addition to flashing the incorrect or buggy firmware.
EDIT: to further clarify, there are no gotchas or anything, you can use your own servers and require the images to be signed or not.
But more widely: you just don't need to flash devices very often.
Moreover OTA is just because that's something we used to be able to do till Tuya shutdown the cloud cutter hack which could do it (which also requires physical access - you have to reboot the device into flashing mode, you can still do it but you can't custom flash anymore OTA on most newer ones).
> Blitzortung.org and Lightningmaps.org are world-wide non-commercial low-cost community-based lightning detection and lightning location networks. They provide free real time lightning maps for a lot of count
[docs of the projects](https://docs.lightningmaps.org)
[real-time lightening map](https://map.blitzortung.org)
[0]https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
Moving soon though so should give it another try then
My parents gave me a smart weather station for Christmas a few years ago. I never even took it out of the box. I know it exposes a web server so I can view a fancy UI in my browser...
I should take it out of the box and run a pentest on it. I imagine it's pretty insecure. The developers of these types of things often don't consider security.