1 Month with the BloomSky Weather Station

I have been running the BloomSky Weather Station now for about a month, and I figure it is time to give it a longer term review.  

After moving it a few times, I settled on a spot in my landscaping.  I wanted to get a nice view of the sunset and so I had to find a good spot facing towards the West.

In order to keep the WiFi signal, you need to keep the unit relatively close to the house, or use a WiFi repeater to boost your signal.  Over the course of the month, I did not run into any connection issues, and the solar panels kept the batteries charged the entire time.  Although the station does not measure rain fall, it will alert  you via the app when it is raining.   I eventually turned that off, as it became annoying after a while. If you happen to live in a normally dry area,  I can see how it can be useful.

As far as temperature accuracy goes, at night or cloudy days, it was usually was within 1 or 2 degree's of my Davis Vantage Vue.  In direct sunlight on the warmer days, that increased to about 5 degree's.  Now the Davis is mounted on a 7 Foot pole with grass under it, so the height difference and location may also account for the higher reading.  Humidity and the Pressure readings have been very close also.  The real test is going to be during a humid 95 degree day in July.

You can also now register the station to report to wunderground.  I registed mine so I could compare my Davis (KNJWASHI4) to the BloomSky (KNJWASHI26).

The real reason to acquire one of these is for the camera.  The image on the right is the final image it took for the day and it does a very nice job in low light.  I have been very happy with the quality of the camera so far.

There is no way to access the unit directly.  The system stays off online, connecting once every 10-15 minutes to send the weather data and upload the latest image, then it disconnects.  I am a little uneasy about not being able to access the unit, for the simple reason is that you are dependent on BloomSky's infrastructure and if something ever happens to them, you will not be able to use the unit.

Even with no direct access to there unit, there are still many things you can do with it.  The guys at wxforum.net came up with some scripts to add the BloomSky photo's, time lapses and weather data to your website, and there is a whole channel on ifttt.com that has pre-defined recipes.  I currently use that to send each day's time lapse video to my Dropbox.  You can also run Weather Display and get the data from wunderground and create some of your own graphs.

Conclusion
This is one of those products that really is in a class of its own.  I don't consider it be a replacement for your Davis or other higher end weather station, but to compliment it.  I have 2 other web camera's setup and neither one can capture the sky like the BloomSky.  Even in direct sun, the pictures still come out very good.   If you are just interested in basic temperature and don't care about rain amounts or wind, this would be a nice step up from a basic remote thermometer.  The small foot print would also work well for condo or apartment dwellers.  I am looking forward to seeing what it captures during some of our summer thunderstorms.

You can see my BloomSky camera and other weather data on my website http://www.warrenskywarn.org.

Bloomsky Weather Station - First 12 hours

https://www.bloomsky.com/

After seeing a review online, I became very interested in this.  I already have a Davis Vantage Vue, and several Web Camera's, but this is an all in one unit, plus it creates the time lapse automatically.  Although I couldn't really justify the price, Bloomsky offered me a community program, which gave me the weather station for just the price of shipping.

TK Bay of XDA Developers posted a nice unboxing video, so I will skip that part and let you watch that on your own.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWuRPZwF8Mo

Essentially the unit itself is a bit larger than a softball.  It also comes with a mounting bracket, a set of solar panels, and a long stake so you can just shove it in the ground if you do not feel like mounting it.  The initial setup is very easy, if you follow the instructions.  It was already dark by the time I got to mess with it, so I decided to just charge it up and stick it in the ground for now without the solar panels.   Once charged (which only took a couple hours), I had it connected to my WiFi and outside in less than 5 minutes.

It was in the low 30's outside at the time, and it took about 2 hours for it to get down to that temperature.  Once it got there, the readings at night were very accurate, always within 2 degree's of my Davis temperature, and usually within 1 degree.  Humidity was about 10% lower, however my Davis is mounted on a 7 foot pole above the grass, where this is only about a foot above the mulch, so that may account for the difference.

The camera seems decent, however with the weather front coming in, all I have to show right now are gray skies.  The camera angle is somewhat adjustable, so you can either point to the horizon to strait up into the sky.  My hope is to catch some nice sunsets, so I will be pointing more towards the horizon once I have it permanently mounted.

Bloomsky has a map on their website, so you can view all the devices in your area.   You can also send your data to wunderground as well.  Speaking of wunderground, if you look on their weather map, you see a large variation of temperatures, due to people using crappy weather stations and inconsistent upload times.  Because the bloomsky devices are all the same hardware and have similar upload times, the weather map appears more consistent.

 Final Thoughts Overall, this appears to be a decent well made product and I am happy with it so far.  This is a nice setup if you live in a condo, where space is at a minimum.   Since this requires a WiFi connection, you have to give thought as to where you put it, as you need to be close to the house, yet have a clear view of the sky.  One thing missing is a wind meter, however it does have a rain gauge and of course the camera.  With the upcoming rain event, I am interested to see how the rain collection compares against the Davis.  I thought the $229 price was a bit high at first, however it is about half of what it cost me for my Davis setup, plus you can get it online without a computer.

I will post a follow up in a few weeks, hopefully by then I will have it mounted in a better location.

Posting to Twitter Part 2

Welcome to the second installment on how I automate my twitter posts.

Part 2: Decoding the pages
Sending the Fire/EMS pages to twitter  is similar to the CAD system.  I still use the TTYtter program, however another program is needed to create the mp3's.

I run Twotonedetect (http://www.twotonedetect.net/) which decodes the pages.  Currently I run it on a windows machine, however I would eventually like to migrate it over to a raspberrypi setup.

The system starts running at 7:15pm and shuts down at 5:59pm.  This allows the county to do their nightly pager tests and not flood my twitter account with useless pages.

TTD has a nice feature where after it decodes and creates the mp3, it will run a command.  This is where it calls my script that moves the file to the webserver, creates the link and posts to twitter.  The process is a bit different than the CAD posts, but the end result is the same.  The mp3's are kept for 7 days before being automatically deleted, so if you want to save the file, you have a week to do so before it is gone forever.

Part 3: So how did this all start anyway?
I'm not sure of the exact year, probably around 2007, we knew of a News/Fire notification service that sent out text pages on 900Mhz using the old text pagers.  I setup a decoder program called PDW (which would email you the decoded pages), along with an old Pro-2004 scanner with a discriminator tap and set out to find the frequency.  Few days later we found it and had it up and running and were sending pages to our phones.

That got old quick.  We had stuff coming in from NJ, PA, NY, CT and beyond.  I changed it to email it to my server and then I wrote a script to filter out only the things we wanted to see.  During this time, I learned more scripting than I had from the $3000 shell scripting course my company sent me to.

It wasn't long before I decided I didn't want to look at my phone every 10 minutes, so I set it up to send the pages to AOL IM via a program called centerim.  Eventually, AOL shut the account down thinking I was spamming and eventually we moved over to gtalk.  More people wanted in and eventually we had about 10 people on the system and the script ballooned to over 1000 lines of code, mainly for filtering.  It was ugly but it worked.

At the time, many of us were on the County TAMI system, but we only had access to a few departments.  The Warren County CAD one day showed up and after looking at it, I set out to add that to our system (the script for that hasn't changed much since).  Now we had access to everything.

Eventually, the 900Mhz Frequency went away and most people outside of the county dropped off.  It was at this time I got tired of seeing everything from the county on my IM, and started to filter by specific towns.  I still did want access to see everything in case I needed it.  I first experimented with RSS which worked but did not refresh automatically.  Eventually I went with twitter, where we are today.

Today we are at over 500 follows, many who do not have access to a police scanner, and now can keep up with what is happening around them.  In addition to twitter, IM has been replaced with a mobile app called Pushover.  There are about 10 user's who get alerted through it now (mostly Firefighters & OEM members).

That is the history of @WCAlerts and now @NorCoAlerts.

How do you get this stuff on twitter?

This is a common question.  If you follow one of my notification twitter accounts @WCAlerts or @NorCoAlerts, the first thing you realize is that everything is completely automated, unlike some of the other ones where some guy is cutting and pasting information in his spare time.  I will manually post if there is an ongoing incident and I happen to be at the computer, but 99% of my info is done without any user intervention.

So how do I do it.  The very short answer is this:
/usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/ttytter.pl -status=$msg -ssl

A less short answer is I use a program called TTYtter (http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/).  Once you set it up, you can send a twitter post through the command line, with the $msg variable above being the actual post.  This is  done in a linux bash shell, so you either need to be running linux/Unix, or cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/) under windows.  This should also work in MacOS 10, although I have never tried it.

Setting up TTYtter is actually pretty easy, however getting your data to a state where you can easily send it is not. 

My Backround

I went from working as a paid EMT back in the early 90's  the IT industry.  The last 15+ years I have dealt mainly with Unix/Linux systems.  Everything is done via a bash script.  These scripts are  very specific to my systems and the county websites, so it isn't something I can just hand someone and say go for it.They are adaptable and if another county comes online with a CAD, should be easily made to work with it.  I was able to get Northampton County up and running very quickly.  

Part 1 - CAD Posts

Sending out the CAD entries from Warren & Northampton Counties work pretty much the same way.  The scripts are a bit different due to differences in their formats, however they both basically work the same way.

Every couple of minutes I pull down all the CAD entries into a file (using lynx).  Then I do a series of of ugly unix commands (awk, sed, cut), and remove all the spaces and unwanted content.  The end result is everything in the CAD listed in a file which looks like this:

MVA W/INJURIES , RTE 57, MANSFIELD TWP

FALL 94 YOF, 73 W JOHNSTON ST, WASHINGTON BORO

CHEST PAIN 49 YOM, 130 POLKVILLE RD, KNOWLTON TWP

ELECTRICAL FIRE , 1041 RIDGE ST #33A, PHILLIPSBURG TO

The next step is I take each line of the file, compare it to an archive of all the previous posted entries.  If the entry does not exist, I post to twitter and add it to the archive.  If it is in the archive file, it moves on to the next line.  I keep about 75 of the newest entries to compare to.

That is really the high level explanation of how it works.  The next Blog post will cover the fire page mp3's (Part 2), and for those really bored, the history on how this whole thing developed (Part 3).

uniden firmware updates are out (notice no caps or explanation marks)

This was a big let down.  Fixed very little and added nothing.  Here are the links to the pages if you are interested.

http://info.uniden.com/UnidenMan4/BCD436HPFirmwareUpdate

http://info.uniden.com/UnidenMan4/BCD536HPFirmwareUpdate

In other news:
.
MONOC is continuing testing on NJICS

Middle Twp. appears to be gearing up to move to NJICS.  Radios are currently being programmed.

New Brunswick is reported to move to either Middlesex County or the State 700 system.  The bad news is they are probably going to be encrypted.

Rumor has it.....

MONOC is going to be moving to the NJICS 700 system.  This is welcome news to scanner listener's, especially if you have ever subjected yourself to listen to the North Jersey UHF repeater for any length of time.

Since MONOC dispatches the Atlantic Health Units, we may very well be hearing MONOC now all over North Jersey, since Atlantic's MICU/EMS coverage is pretty wide spread.

Now if only MICCOM would jump on, then we would have the 3 big players on 700.

BCDx36HP Updates are coming

Uniden Update
Uniden's Upman stated that some firmware updates are coming.  That was about 2 weeks ago, so they should be here any time.  Of course no one knows exactly what has been fixed.  I can only hope at this point the Analyze features have been updated so they actually are usable.

While we are on that subject, there are other rumblings that they finally have a permanent fix for the RTC Clock issue.  Of course that is going to mean returning the units to Uniden to be repaired.  No word on the screen dimming, or if there is even a permanent fix for that issue.

All is quiet on the Whistler Front
Everyone who bought the new 1095 scanners must be happy with them, as there has been very little posted about it.

Speaking of Whistler scanners (and their clones), if anyone has the ability to fix a Pro668 (My keyboard connector came off the circuit board), please contact me directly.

NJ Scanning News
There was an apparent issue with the NJICS system that went on for many months.  If you were experiencing dead air, that issue may now be resolved.  I can report that everything off the Montana Mountain tower is coming in great once again.

NJDOT must be ramping up for winter, over 100 new radio ID's have appeared over the last week.  NJSP has been busy adding radios as well. Speaking of NJSP, for some reason they seemed to have moved the Met Life Stadium ops over to StateCom-2.  Maybe to provide better inter-ops with other agencies.

Now that football season is almost here, Rutgers will be busy with their home games.  They generally will be on one of the StateCom talkgroups and will NOT be encrypted so they can coordinate with Middlesex County and NJ Transit Police.

Look for another update once we hear from Uniden.

Update:  After posting this, I came across this on Radio Reference from Uniden's Upman.  Apparently we will have a back light fix for the x36HP radios...eventually:

The above is a little premature. While we are setting up a process for those of you who are experiencing this issue, the fix will require some parts that have a long lead time. We expect to be able to start the program in a couple of months. In the mean time, we appreciate your patience while we get everything in place. At this time, if you are experiencing either the display backlight fading or real-time clock battery issue, please do not send your scanner in for repair.