This week we dive into what it takes to be an open source weatherman by looking at the success of FediMeteo , RTL-433 WeeWX and other tools that can let you predict the weather.

It's Tuesday, August 5th, and this is, don't Forget to Foss the weekly podcast about free and open source software, projects, and community.

I'm Robin Monks.

Let's dig in.

Many at-home mother stations and other smart radio communication devices use the 433 megahertz radio frequency.

The RTL-433 project is available to decode the communication within the channel space and display information from smart sensors within a range.

I was easily able to pick up my own outdoor weather station as well as another somewhere else in my neighborhood.

RTL-433 supports over 260 devices today.

You can get it running on Mac OS, Linux.

And even run it in a Docker instance or run it on a Raspberry Pi you have lying around.

Although maybe it's just me that has like a dozen Raspberry Pis lying around.

You can use this data in other applications like averaging the weather information from multiple weather systems, showing weather data inside home assistant, even if your weather station doesn't have a dedicated home assistant plugin, and just seeing what else you can find in your community.

I was surprised to be able to read the tire pressure monitoring sensors or TPMS from my car in the driveway.

I could if I wanted, show my current tire pressure in home assistant and track it over time.

Even if you don't currently have an outdoor sensor, the RTL-433 GitHub page lists all the different sorts of sensors it's compatible with, and you can find many of those sensors extremely cheap on Amazon.

To use RTL-433 you need an RTL-SDR compatible device.

You can get the RTL-SDR blog USB dongle for about $35.

It used to be 25, but sadly, tariffs have increased the price significantly, but it's still a fairly cheap purchase and you can do a lot of fun with it.

As with anything like this, the better the antenna you can get, the more you'll be able to pick up.

Ideally, some sort of external antenna will be able to pick up more things in your neighborhood.

since you're picking up things of the people's backyards, please don't be creepy.

In some areas you can even pick up your water meter using an RTL-SDR dongle.

WeeWX can let you publish your own forecast dashboard with more detail and augmented data than your other station provides on its own.

It supports a lot of wifi-enabled weather stations, as well as getting data via RTL-SDR.

You can publish your weather to a website or make it part of a personal dashboard for yourself, and you can store the logs over time so you can see patterns and changes in weather in your area.

WeeWX is a Python script and generates very interesting data outputs.

It can also combine data from multiple sources to build a more complete picture of the weather in your area.

you could also go down the path of getting an ESP home device.

They're usually very inexpensive and you can easily attach your own sensors to measure things like pressure, humidity, temperature, or even other things that matter to you.

Also interesting is it's possible to connect weather sensors to Meshtastic devices.

Meshtastic is a tool that lets you use LoRa or long range wireless technology to be able to send weather data over further distances if you have a large property where wifi or 433 megahertz sensors don't make sense, you can use this to send data over long distances.

I will be talking more about Meshtastic and MeshCore as open LoRa solutions in a future episode.

At some point I want to get deeper into the topics of radio technology and open source.

It's a bit of a passion area for me.

I realize I can go down some pretty deep rabbit holes there, but I do think it's interesting and it's a way for you to be able to more directly own your communication.

Next up I wanna talk about FediMeteo.

It's something I saw in Mastodon recently.

It seems to have a lot of popularity in Europe, but not nearly as much in North America.

Fed EO provides weather information around the globe that you can follow on activity pub compatible services like Mastodon or threads.

It operates a fediverse instance for each region, and then each large city within that region is its own fediverse user that posts multiple times a day with current conditions.

The next 12 hours of forecast data and a long-term forecast.

FediMeteo is yet another chance to discuss what has become a recurring character in the podcast so far, and that's snac.

Because snac is so efficient.

The entire project with all its users runs on a single four Euro VPS node, Stefano Marelli has written a great rundown on how he created FediMeteo and the challenges he faced as he expanded the service out from Italy, to additional countries and cities.

Although FediMeteo itself is not open source, it runs entirely on open source data sources and open source software.

Each city bot calls open-meteo, which is the data source for FediMeteo every six hours.

Parses JSON with a 70- line shell script, and then posts via snac's CLI tool.

Since snac only keeps a flat file object store and doesn't use a database system, the entire solution runs in 150 megabytes of Ram.

FediMeteo shows us what's possible when you take these small open source tools and bundle them together in ways to create useful resources.

And this is just a start for what's possible in open source weather.

There's a whole community around outside weather stations, outside weather sensors, building your own weather stations, as well as things like NOAA's Citizen weather observer program.

You could even use free software tools to be able to directly read weather data from passing satellites.

There is so much to learn here and I don't wanna get into the weeds too far, but I encourage you to look at what's possible, both with the tools you already have and also what you might wanna build to control your own information sources for the weather in your area.

All links and further details are available in the show notes.

If you have comments or suggestions, lots of options for contacting me up on RPM.sh.

Be sure to let me know what tools and resources you use to manage your weather.

Last week's episode was a bit special.

I posted a webinar I hosted with a few other technology leaders in the healthcare space about how open technology can be used to make healthcare better.

If you've not had a chance, listen to that.

I'd encourage you to go back and check it out, and I'd love to hear feedback from folks as well on what kind of topics they're interested in hearing about for the show.

Open technology, open data, open source software.

There's a lot of things we can talk about here, and I wanna make sure that people who listen are hearing about things they enjoy.

The music for the show is by Bohdan Kuzmin.

Don't forget to, FOSS is released through the Creative Comments Attribution Share-alike 4.0 International License.

See you next week.