I wouldn't mind building a weather station at some point as well. It's not something I really need but it would be neat. In conjunction with that, I could also use an RTL-SDR dongle to make a receiver for satellite weather data from various publicly available weather satellites.

The other idea I've toyed with is an automatic plant watering system, in service of my aspiration to start growing my own hot peppers (ghost peppers, habaneros, carolina reapers, etc.)

so I have a lot to learn and figure out in processing the raw data.

If you're interested in weather / environmental "stuff" in a broader sense, you might also be interested in a lot of the other data the USG (and others) make available. NOAA, the USGS, etc. put out all sorts of neat datasets. You can get all the obvious stuff (temp, barometric pressure, etc.) as well as water levels in various creeks and lakes and rivers, discharge volume for same, ground conductivity, stuff about lightning, severe storms (tornados, hurricanes, etc.), wildfires, etc., etc., etc. I'm pretty sure somebody creative could find some really interesting applications for all of that stuff.

DO NOT use a DHT-11 or DHT-22 sensor. Absolute garbage. Spring for the Bosch sensors.

As far as processing the raw data, I'm more interested right now in deciding if I should average which two of the thermometer or barometer readings I've got, and also deciding what to use as a high/low temp for the day - I've had some data dropouts and server crashes where I missed the noon/1pm high temp.

I did get GOES satellite data with a RTL-SDR once a couple of years ago. The antenna is more important than they'd lead you to believe, as is where the antenna is - you pick up a lot of fuzz up to some degrees above the horizon if you place the antenna in an urban setting.

I've got mine collecting dust in a drawer along with a few other impulsive purchases (why did a buy a jar of ferromagnetic fluid again?). I'm a few months into 3d printing I'm seeing the value of using an RPi as a print server to monitor long prints. Now that I see how it could make my life a little easier I'm more motivated to get it set up.

I'm doing something similar on my rpi3, but indoor. A few environment sensors + a basic thermostat script to control my box-fan-in-the-window-plus-smart-plug "HVAC" (not that its been anything interesting as far as control during the summer: ON). Data collection is mostly temp, CO2, and PM since I can somewhat calibrate those, plus pulling down the 24 forecasts from NOAA twice a day, all into a sqlite DB with grafana on top. I'm hoping to get some exterior sensors running as well, maybe off a zero or something smaller, but we'll see.

Bonus points, I can tinker with some probably over-complicated timeseries python classes for sqlite.

My version is a zero 2 with a humidity sensor controlling a dehumidifier via the tradfri plug. Works great.

Time to first graph was quickest with influxdb for me.

Zerotier and nats.io connect the things.

I want to sprinkle some pico w's around for door/window position monitoring.