Dedicated Display Console

Tempest Owners Feature Requests
226

Sorry to rain a little on your parade, but lots of things would be great. Unfortunately Mick was right. You can’t always get what you want…

I’d suggest you spend some time and try to spin up a bit on the 7 or so years of history in the forums and set your expectations accordingly.

WF has historically had zero interest in providing ‘any’ console at all. It is believed that this is a business decision. Their architecture assumes a very mobile-centric setup:

  • you need their mobile app to set the station up
  • you are expected to use their mobile app and/or web page to access its data
  • you can choose to make your station public, but it’s not required that you do so
  • you must have a hub - the hub connects continuously to WF servers
  • each sensor is registered to ‘one’ hub on your LAN, setup via the mobile app
  • you cannot touch firmware at all - WF pushes updates occasionally at their pacing
  • you cannot tune the sensors yourself, they get tuned by WF magic-math that is undisclosed to us. They used to call it ‘continuous learning’ but I don’t know what today’s term is
  • many things (lightning, altered rain) come only from WF servers
  • other readings can be heard in the UDP broadcast to your LAN whether you want it or not
  • diagnostic data is not available to the users
  • there used to be built-in compensations for physical design of the sensors (example - corrected temp readings based on temp+wind+solar) but we have no visibility toward what they massage, no ‘off’ switches for that, and no idea what the corrections are. You get whatever the Hub gives you when it’s done tweaking things based on its tunings and firmware

There is a nice set of APIs if you want to develop - WeatherFlow Tempest API & Developer Platform

That said, there are a variety of ways to get nice dashboards if you do some work yourself. These include:

  • run weewx and roll your own dashboard and use a Kindle Fire for a touchscreen
  • run the great pi-based wfpiconsole app (pi + touchscreen)
  • run Home Assistant and roll your own dashboard, again easily displayed on a Kindle Fire

If you want less configurable variants, there are lots of third-party-integrations out there including:

The LightMaps $119 product seems to be not configurable but it looks pretty turn-key. The two pi-centric integrations above are more labor and more expensive probably but your labor to install/configure/support is worth something too. Regardless it’s far less than half the price of a Davis WeatherLink Console, although admittedly they do not act like a Hub at all.

I could see building an os+app combination for either e-ink or piconsole, possibly even a docker image, as very doable. But that doesn’t mean it can be productized into a product you’d make money developing, selling, and supporting.

(best example I can give you there is Home Assistant - you can buy their very expensive little pi-based hardware, but you can get there MUCH cheaper and more flexibly if you run their docker variant on your own pi and configure/alter as you see fit. Somebody at NabuCasa is being paid to do os updates, regression testing, etc. for their version changes. That has to cost some serious $$$).

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