I’m interested in what Smart Home Automation any of you may have done with your Tempest or even just your ideas. There are a variety of integrations possible and detailed on the site, but curious as to the innovative integration any of you have done.
What are you doing? What would you do if you we so inclined?
I’m using Home Assistant (HA) with a community supported extension for WeatherFlow. I own two Tempests - one at home and one on some property a few hours away. I was formerly a Smartthings user, but it’s fallen into poor support. HA is a comparatively heavy lift, but I also find that adds great flexibility. Here’s what I’ve added.
Dashboard - tablet and phone access to provides a weather station view. This is pretty basic at the moment, but have intentions to make this look like a display that might appear on other home weather stations (e.g., think Brookstone). Hopefully prettier than WeatherFlow’s app.
Storm Clouds - Basic lighting schedules timed with sunrise/sunset are a staple for home automation. However, I use the brightness / lux value from my Tempest to recognize when the daytime sky is dark and supplemental lights outside or inside are warranted.
Irrigation - I use Rachio for my sprinklers. It already adjusts them based on the weather, but now it’s specifically using my Tempest PWS home station.
High Wind Alerts - I thought this was novel. I have some cameras (Amazon Blink) that sometimes get tripped up by trees when it’s windy. When Tempest senses high enough wind gusts, I disarm those cameras and arm them back again when the wind subsides.
Future Plans:
History - HA can store any parameter for as long as you want. I currently flush the data after 3 days, but have plans to keep rainfall data (ie, the missing rain annual gauge) for up to two years. Maybe also some historical temp stats as well.
Notifications - Part of my setup is to push interesting notifications to relevant devices. E.g., Doorbell cam sees someone, it pops up an image on my TV if on. Similar notifications to any smart devices like phones or smart home tablets. I’ll add “It started raining” or “Thunder 10 miles away” to that. Our phone app does that, of course, but I generally will have those notifications in my system that are of general interest to others.