One of the most unexpected and wonderful things about my Ambient Weather station is that within its settings app, you can configure an additional URL for it to send periodic pings to. In my case, I whipped up ambient2mqtt[0] as a way to capture the output of the weather station locally and do what I want with it - in this case, post the data to MQTT and InfluxDB.

A few years after that I also purchased a Purple Air PM2.5 monitor. I was pleasantly surprised that this device exposes a local REST interface for polling the data. Naturally, I wrote purpleair2mqtt[1] to pull the data from that and post to MQTT and InfluxDB.

Together these two applications and pieces of hardware give me a great view of the weather conditions. And like the author of the article, I found that other weather information tended to be off significantly. Doubly true as I live next to a lake in a rural-ish part of New England which is about 500ft higher than the city and airport where our weather data comes from. Over the last couple of years I've been pleased to see that my data has become the defacto source for weather data in my town (I publish it to numerous sources) and that the PM2.5 information gets brought into lots of reports, including the EPA's AirNow system - which is great, because it doesn't look like there's another PM2.5 monitor within 20 miles of me.

[0]: https://github.com/pridkett/ambient2mqtt [1]: https://github.com/pridkett/purpleair2mqtt