WeatherFlow Tempest Review and How To Integrate into Home Assistant

so i've always been that data nerd combined with that weather nerd and well i live in the perfect state for you know there's some of the craziest weather so why not have a great system to monitor said weather i did that previous video of that little diy little box we 3d printed everything put it together etc and it has worked well and feeds into my home assistant home automation software but of course i've always wanted more whether it be lighting detection and lux and everything else and uv well once you start to kind of pile all that into a little diy thing well that starts to get down a deep rabbit hole and well that's where probably that diy for me even though this is the digiblar diy channel so we'll just call this the digiblar channel for this video because there's not going to be any diy like soldering type stuff here because this is pre-made ready to go and some other smarter people than i put this together in as you can see there's no moving parts to this thing and there's tons of different places you can mount it whether it be on poles or on fence post or whatever it's a pretty awesome little weather system and the cool part about it they even have a local api that you can feed right into home assistant and get just butt loads of data probably more than you want you probably gotta filter those out but hey there's some people that are more nerdy than i so let's dive in look a little closer at some of the things on this little system so definitely check out all the links down below for all the resources their products and everything and definitely if there is something that does change we can't update the video well that will be down below so don't miss out on any type of updates and the links they are affiliate links and the way those do work is there's no additional cost to you but it does help out the channel so a quick rundown of what's in the box i mean yeah i've had this up for a month and a half so we're going to do an unboxing because that'd be kind of fake and that's what we don't do here i will say that yes it's they're not lying it's just a five minute setup and it's not bad at all to do and so pretty much the gist of it is probably the longest is gonna be part of your setup which is the one i went kind of through was him hauling around of where are you gonna put this damn thing now maybe if you had something way out and you had a fence post or whatever and it would get good lighting and good wind etc that would be super easy but didn't have that being in a neighborhood so i had to put it up on the kind of the eve of my home and then i want to get it far enough away from the actual roof line that way the the heat wouldn't impact the sensor itself so one thing you won't see here is i did order that extra accessory was their mounting bracket but then i ended up modifying it and i'll kind of go over that a little bit later so to the unit itself is right here you'll see these are going to be the solar panels and it's going to face the southern direction and there is a little arrow on it to show which way you want to face north and the whole reason behind that is because of these sensors if you can see them right here there's four little circles underneath and that's how it determines the direction and the velocity of the wind pretty cool because there's no moving parts to it that's pretty badass and then you have these little vents and i i think this was a stevenson but the name's probably going to escape me that they called it these little vents and you see them all over in different if you see like little digital billboards and stuff around definitely if you haven't looked look at them look at some of the digital billboards that have the temperature and you'll probably see these little vents and that's where the temperature sensor is at and so all the sensors are up in the neck of there and then on the top which you can't see is i've seen a picture on the forums of this you know tempest weather flow and they have the little sensors for determines if the rain is hitting and so the rain's hitting on top and that's how it determines how much rain is coming down pretty cool technology on how that you know happens and it's pretty instant as well compared to those little ones that the little cup that tips over and measures et cetera there's going to be a delay because you have to wait for that cup to tip over and measure it etc so there's even an awesome lightning sensor inside here and it even triangulates that based on other ones out in the cloud and will notify you on the phone and it's pretty awesome i i don't even know that hey he has lightning detected 20 miles away and i'm like really and then pull up the radar and sure enough got a cell coming in and that would be very helpful if you potentially forgot something outside or your windows down et cetera and you need to go out and make sure and secure things from that impending storm so on the bottom here i have taped up because i want y'all you know basically trying to commission mine but there's just simple on off switch and then there's four if you can see them here there's four little pads here that is for another accessory that i did not need and what that accessory is i'll turn this around so you can see the on off it shows the battery and the input the 2.4 volt battery and the accessory did not need is i think it's called the booster accessory where if you live in an area that does not get enough solar or you know radiation front to light the panels up enough to charge then of course you'll need something to give you a little boost of power to charge you know the battery inside now the way this mounts there's a couple different mounts is one mount and this part doesn't come with it i've had this from doing some ip cameras this is just a little it's a standard screw on it that you mount for like doing any type of camera tripods or camera mounts and you can get these these little ball joint style ones that you can get these off of amazon or whatever camera supply stuff and this mount allows you to use that little hole if you want to or you can run a screw through it and this is where if you had it where you wanted to put stuff on you know say that you mount this to the fence post and do make sure it is facing north and then you just twist it on there and that's it and it mounts up pretty cleanly but if you're like me and you need something a little higher you can get the pole mount and the pole mount is simply that it's this same exact mount but you would take and put this and run this down the pole and one little tip that i did i found as well was my pole had a little play to it and you don't want vibration in it so i just wrapped a couple wraps of electrical tape around the pole and that gave a little extra tension you shove this in there in the hole joke's there and then you tighten it up and there you go and it mounts just fine and then also it's a little easier to do given that you can point this you know north being a little easier because of just it's on that round pole and you may be saying well what type of pole do i use well at least in the us it was fairly easy and even my local non-big box just local hardware store had some that top rail and it has you can put multiple joints together because it's tapered on one end and you could mount them up and you can you know put them on the side of the house or whatever trying to get above some trees or whatever it may be because everyone's situation is different then how does this communicate to the internet to your home assistant or whatever now the home assistant stuff i'll show later in the video it's all using a little plug-in and type deal add-on but we'll get to that if you're going to do the home assistant section you can find the markers down you can skip to that or you can just get past you don't use it so what you get is a hub and i've had some questions on the live stream as well what about other countries well yes there i did find out there are for other countries they because they don't support 915 megahertz say in the eu because that's where cell phones are at but yet u.s so they do have a eu model and i believe they even have an australian model to get around well i wouldn't say get around but to support those other frequencies and if you do order from them you'll notice that of course i'm sure you'll get the different style plug as well because this is if you go pull up the map there is worldwide sites of all of these and you'll find them just about in every country out there and it's pretty amazing how many they have out there so definitely probably is usable in your country now for the hub the way this works there is a one the downside i did have and it's i'm being nitpicky is this is just wi-fi so you're not going to plug this in ethernet to your network it's going to be wi-fi over 2.4 gigahertz to your network supplying data it's not a whole lot of data so but it does work fine and i just hit it behind a tv but it does allow you to put in a better placement to get better signal from the weather station itself so they do give the power supply and i've given kudos for this they went usbc kudos to them i love to see that and then this light turns green there's blue for bluetooth it's easy to pair up with your phone because of the bluetooth you follow the on-screen app go through it's super simple to pair up and then it uses like i say 900 megahertz or depending on your country 800 megahertz and i've gone pretty far through several walls and all the way across my backyard and haven't had any signal issues with this thing because of that lower frequency kind of helps penetrate things so now there is another accessory that i got and no this isn't off of my only fan's channel and uh this actually goes on here and what this is is this is just a bird i guess deterrent type thing to stop the birds from landing on it and just a kind of a rubber band piece and i got this off of their website and they say don't order it unless you really need it but i after about two or three days i did get a rain alert that said oh well you know it's raining and i was like no it's not it's well come to find out i went looked up there there's bird crap on top of this sensor and yeah that does wash off with the rain but hey i didn't want those false alerts yes i'm ocd about that and so once you put this down here and i think this was seven or eight dollars or something like that maybe it's pretty cheap for this what you get but it does help out and now you get this mean looking machine that you can you know mount them the side of your house or on top of your house or whatever of course the birds definitely don't want to land on top of that with the spike so it does you know does the job i can say that so i'm gonna go mount this thing back up and put it back on the house we're gonna bring it into home assistant i'll show some screenshots out of that android app which probably the same for ios and so definitely stick around and see some cool stuff that you can do with bringing your own weather data and everything straight into your home automation so just to go over the sensor just a little bit more because they do it better than i did is the light sensor missed that one is in the top of course that's with that rain sensor that gets you the uv index solar radiation ambient light there's the pressure sensors there's of course i talked about the sonic wind sensor which is cool temp humidity lightning sensor solar power etc all packed into that one awesome little unit and then we've got the little amount with the one inch pole mount and that leads to there's an awesome great little topic that if you go over to and i'll leave the link down below so you don't have to go dig for it is if you go to the tempest community website they have like all their little forms and whatnot and there's a pin topic of photos of tempest installations there's a ton of photos i highly suggest before you install yours go through and look at some of the pictures that they have up here and because you get a lot of ideas of like oh i didn't think about that i could go mount it over on this side of the yard and i could use xyz fence post or whatever and you can see exactly what other people have done that may you know apply to your particular type of installation and there's ones out there that they also found that this didn't work too well for them and so that may save you a lot of time and not you know go through doing that now of course i did mention there's the api for all the developer cool people nerdy things lots of documentation for the cloud side of it the websocket and even the local udp which leads us to that i know you've been looking for the home assistant stuff how do you get it in there and of course you know i'll leave this link down there but it's weather flow to mqtt and i had one little issue that was due to someone else putting in a blank space that you couldn't see so he does actually read his little support forum thread here and he did respond actually in the same day so kudos to him i'm gonna say it be jon but you can check out his github installation of this he has some pretty good documentation so if you want to go through and i installed it on my unraid box but hey if you're doing haos do the add-ons he has all the stuff right there you want to do docker run you got docker compose even on there and in the add-ons he has the instructions right here for home assistant supervised you can see just hit and add on the add-on store scroll down find it install it etc boom there you go and there's not a whole lot of setup for it because it uses udp so do make sure when you pair that hub probably put it on the same network as your home assistant box or where this docker container lives unless you want to handle doing some udp broadcast to get it across the network and if you are doing that then you probably you know much of a network pro where you can do that i'm not going to go through them all but as i ramble on you can see there's tons of sensors that it drops into home assistant it's pretty awesome and it's all freaking auto discovery the thing just pops up under mqtt now some of the sensors i have and i do have this zoomed in is of course i just like you know the temperature the dew point yeah i live in louisiana and sometimes this thing says oppressive uh they should probably make it even more than that just downright ridiculous um it's dark outside temperature level is nice i guess um the lightning stuff's pretty cool it shows the lightning strikes and even shows the distance in the energy i did like to see that was pretty neat the rain duration the intensity etc rain rate i have a bunch of data on that so i have it back when it was raining the other day and you can see all the little cool stuff and you can see all the different rain rates in your history of home assistance so if you're doing any type of you know watering automations with sprinklers you could feed all that stuff in there so there's a ton of sensors that you can feed off of whether they're just binary sensors or whatnot they got the uv levels voltage it's just crazy all the different sensors they have it drops straight into home assistant and then you could do automations to act on them now i know i did mention in this map is pretty impressive is all of the sensors that they have even slows down my web browser because there's so many of them and with this map you want to jump in look at someone else's data sure enough there it is you can see all the data and it's right there for you and you can feed weather underground and feeding weather underground gets you that api key so you can pull data back through weather underground as well that's pretty cool now for the phone app it does allow you to quickly see some forecast data i'm sure that your system is feeding into help drive this whole analysis thing going on but it goes in through and you can see by hour and everything and scroll through it's pretty decent looking app i do wish they did have a dark mode i'm not able to find that but allows you to see everything and even see if your system is online and you do get history from your particular system you can jump through and see by week by month you know the max and the minimum etc and it's pretty cool that all the data you know even this is for someone's not even doing any type of home integration stuff you can just go and drive through and see all this stuff now once you drill down to actually your unit you can actually see that's pretty much live i do believe if you're nearby the hub it actually does connect through bluetooth to get even a faster connection but this does work away from the home and allows you to see your live data from your system no matter where you're at you can see probably the wind direction is changing a little bit there and does allow you to see all the different things and you can even share your own little weather system with other people so in closing you say well yeah i checked the price out on that travis it's a pretty steep there but is it worth it yeah i definitely say it is worth it i have researched a couple different other weather systems and they have moving parts you know like for the wind or they got the little cups that dip you know for the rain etc and that's just something i didn't want to deal with i'd have enough stuff to projects around the house i didn't need additional ones of moving parts and things and something may break and that's why i really love this one and to get up into some of those other systems they were like even twice the cost of this so this was really a no-brainer after that and see how amazing this thing has been and i've definitely have in the past month month and a half since i've had it up had a bunch of different crazy weather from i think up to six or seven inches of rain per hour i mean some insane freaking weather that have you know droppings that spring weather summer whatever it may be in the south it just wants to come do that drop down to that monsoon of rain during the afternoon the lightning detection is amazing on it i know some of it reading about it it does take other ones in so it does help to try to triangulate that lightning and i know we'd like to be a lot of cloud or just local stuff here but this one kind of fits that bill of hey i can grab my data from it locally and that still kind of can feed the cloud to help out the cause of seeing all the weather and rain and whatever it might be to help out in the different calculations from things out in the world so yep basically if i had this to do all over again i would definitely buy this again because i've really enjoyed it and i can't wait to put it back up right after we get finished with this video so big thanks to all the patreon subscribers youtube members because definitely i couldn't buy products like this and share them with you out here and so i definitely appreciate it thanks for watching it press all the buttons and you all take care good bye [Music] in this video i'm gonna teach you how to make the best smart home

Channel: digiblur DIY

Views: 38,213

Keywords: digiblur, digiblurDIY, home automation, hass.io, hassos, tasmota, esp32, esp8266, arduino, esphome, diy, smart home, electronics, cameras, zigbee, wifi, weatherflow, tempest, weather forecast homeassistant

Id: 7CTTX_L452g

Length: 22min 14sec (1334 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2022