I’ve been poking around online and this forum appears to be the best place to ask this. We bought a basic and fun weather La Cross Weather station (the WS-9611U-IT), which uses a TX29U-IT 915Mhz sensor. Digging deep into the manual, I noticed that the station will automatically pick up any TX29U-IT sensors in its area, which got me to thinking that maybe I could use something else to pick up the sensor’s signal. Something like my computer, perhaps.
The catch is, I’m having a devil of a time finding any information on whether you can find / rig up a USB-compatible receiver that would pick up the 915Mhz signal and allow the computer to do something with it. This being a busy forum on Home Built Weather Stations, I figure that somebody on here has probably already tried to do this.
So, am I right? Has anyone done this? Or has it been determined to be impossible? Is there something I could just buy off the shelf that would plug in and stream the data?
Any thoughts, advice, or cautionary tales on this topic would be much appreciated.
I don’t believe there is any stand alone receiver that will work with your lacrosse station. rfxcom makes a receiver that works with Oregon Scientific brand weather stations but nothing for lacrosse. Unless you are really into doing things the very hard way (getting the receiver is just the start) your best bet is to buy another weather station which includes a computer interface, there are many available including inexpensive brands like Oregon Scientific and LaCrosse (might be able to use your sensor as an extra sensor), serious stations from Davis (starting around $400 with PC interface), up to as much as you care to spend.
Ok, I was afraid that would be the case. I noticed only one La Crosse station that seems to stream wirelessly to a computer, and that one is $250.00, so I’ll put that on our long-term list.
I had hoped that there’d be some sort of inexpensive 915Mhz antenna usb-dongle item that I could use to get the signal, and then we could handle the filtering/interpretation stuff on our own (a “fun” software/driver writing project). Thinking about it again, I suppose $250 is a lot cheaper than the time I would have put into it anyhow.
This seems like an interesting project, but would take a serious amount of time to look into. The LaCrosse stations don’t seem to have much information around to help. But if you could dig into the weatherstation and use it as a receiver, and find out how it is using the information. Like if it’s converting the received info into digital or leaving it analog, it’s probably using something in the 5-12 volt range. You could probably digitize the analog using something like a 555 timer (but faster) rigged up as a level detector to convert to digital. Assuming you could connect the output to your serial or parallel port on your pc, I wonder how the sensors are identified.
Maybe you could start with something like a remote temp sensor in your garden. I started with a hi/lo in the garden until i broke it.
But i did get a LaCrosse 2810 wireless for $89.00 to replace a 2310. It’s all wireless and the anemometer seems update faster then the 2310 did, but… im on a second one. I took the first one back to costco because the anemometer stopped reporting and now im on the second with the same problem. I’m not sure if its because the little solar cell on it can’t keep it charged or what but the first one never worked and this one did for about a week before stopping. I’m probably going to put together a fund to put money into to hopefully step up to a better one sometime in the future.
My brother in law picked up a cheap little station from Maplins a while back - with a wireless 433MHz connection from the outside sensor unit to a base station. The base station does not connect to the PC though. No brand name, but it seems to be a wh1050, which is sold under various guises.
So he picked up an RX2-433 receiver for a couple of quid and used a length of wire running inside a drinking straw (to keep it upright) as the antenna. As it uses 5v power, he has a usb cable connected to supply it.
This receiver is connected - via a 50k resistor - to the mic port of a computer.
The hard part was decoding the output, but it certainly works and he has the data being used to draw graphs via rrdtool.
Yeah - I must admit I was impressed. The basic getting the data to a PC is fairly simple, but decoding it …
But he is a programmer and works with decoding stuff a lot. From one of his emails -
The whole lot is transmitted like nothing I’ve ever seen before Every 48 seconds it sends a burst of data with 7 copies of the same information. I found this does help as one or more may have interference on them. It’s also faster than the receiver I could get is officially capable of, so I had to come up with some creative signal analysis software to pull out the data. So basically it seems like 1 wire internal coms with proprietary transmission to the base.
Well, I have a La Crosse WS1613IT and have wondered the same thing. Hooked up a receiver and scope tonight and managed to capture a good signal from the unit. I think we’ve worked out the modulation, bit length and number of bits transmitted, but there are a few odd things about the signal that still need to be worked out. At this point, unless we’ve made some bad assumptions, I would say that it is likely doable. Plus the sensors are quite reasonable on Amazon, so it may not be a bad way to go if it all works out.
Of course, if anyone has any info on how the bit stream is setup it would be much appreciated!! :lol:
