Tempest clone on Kickstarter

I found a clone of the Tempest on Kickstarter.

What do you think about it?

One point I find better solved:
With the power-cord the sensors are supplied with a power supply. Super if you do not have enough sun in winter…and some are affected by this :slightly_smiling_face:

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Man I was surprised and somewhat impressed, however I can’t find where it has dew point and if the dew point is missing then I would not get it.

I like that it has a heater to melt the snow and ice in the winter which I am having this issue right now as I’m assuming frost built up on the wind sensors in these cold temps. wind barely gets above 5 km/h even though official stations are saying 10-15 km/h.

Well … it does say it does humidity. I would not necessarily assume that means it does not display dew point (dew point can be computed from temperature and relative humidity,and I am pretty sure that’s how the Tempest works … see Derived Metric Formulas ) … but, if their app does not give you dew point, I would hope the developers are responsive enough to add it to the product.

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Yeah that is shocking to think any decent weather station would omit dew point and I’m wondering about there’s because they list everything it does with the exception of dew point plus I couldn’t even find a way of asking someone on their website that question.

Did that dude really install it @(1.20 in the video) the front door? c’mon!!!

They do have an “Ask a Question” button on their FAQ page at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1758231609/wittboy-the-all-in-one-intelligent-weather-station/faqs .

I still think that they say “humidity” and dew point is a way to measure humidity, so, I have not jumped to “you can’t get dew point with this setup”. But, it might be best to ask them.

The one thing that nobody has mentioned is that the device does not do lightning detection (although, from the questions and FAQ, that is an add-on option available from Ecowitt). Not sure how much that would cost and how it would be hooked up to the system.

The build quality looks totally naff. The top part with the gap for wind is on 4 toothpick flimsy pieces of plastic. (go… China)

It seems to me maybe because it is an inexpensive product that they found a way to beef up the price with many extra additions available. Where as at least weatherflow includes as much as possible from the get go. Plus I like the lightning feature now that I have seen it in action, it would be hard to do without it.

The orientation of the solar seems odd, and they don’t say how long the super-cap will power things in the absence of enough sun, nor how long the AA backup power will work for dreary winters. Their FAQ disclaimer about haptic rain accuracy is funny. In short, they don’t know if it’ll work.

Their gateway supporting ‘wired’ is goodness.

The option to power it via AC is nice if you want the heater enabled.

That said, it might be worth consideration. Ecowitt’s standalone other sensors are pretty good (I have a bunch) and if their gateway is anything like the old gw1000 then weewx support will be a snap.

Be aware, however, that Ecowitt gateways need to be able to phone home to China for their watchdog timers, so you’d want to treat this as an untrusted IoT thing on your network.

But I suspect you could build an Ecowitt setup for about the same money with more traditional moving parts anemometer and tipping bucket rain and have more accuracy.

(I thought it funny that I got a Tempest ad while surfing the Ecowitt site on Amazon to look at options)

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I have become very dubious of Kickstarter products. As an ‘early adopter’ I have paid for more than 2 dozen Kickstarter and Indiegogo products, and got no product out of most of them. ALL have taken far longer to produce (sometimes by years) than initially promised. And only a couple of the ones that I put money into turned into viable businesses (Weatherflow/Tempest being one of them).

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But they already are a full fledged company making weather stations, so I don’t think this one will be a fail on kickstarter. I funded it to try it out because I like to compare weather stations and I’m interested to see how it does in comparison to Tempest.

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I’ve had really good luck with Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but I’m very selective about which products I support. If there is an established company behind it the odds are good that they will deliver. They probably won’t meet their initial delivery date, but that should be expected. The fact that this comes from a company located in Hong Kong bothers me, also it’s not a pretty as a Tempest. :grinning:

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