YOU’LL NEED THIS

RASPBERRY PI

This credit-card sized computer costs around $35.

WEATHER SENSOR

We used the Maker Life kit, but others are available, or you could build your own.

WEATHER, EH? WHO’D HAVE IT? Whether it is the relentless onslaught of that burning gasball in the sky or the incessant gushing of rain, weather never ends—which makes it perfect for a great project, using Linux shenanigans and fancy sensors.

We happened to have a Maker Life Weather Station kit hanging around in the office, which means we’re making it (and its Pi Zero W, and included sensors) at least the initial basis of this tutorial. However, you’re not missing out if you don’t have the same gear to work with. This is something you can put together yourself—various Pi-friendly stores sell sensors that hook on to GPIO pins or sit in USB ports. You could also exploit the more commercial end of the market. The Netatmo Smart Home Weather Station (a slightly painful $180 investment) can be tapped into by WeeWX [ Image A], which you can find out more about in the “Your Own Weather Website” box (below-right).

So, we now have some sensors, but how these actually work to generate the data we’re after isn’t important—it’s the end result, a stream of data points, that is key. How we interpret that data and what we do with it once we’ve understood it is what transforms a simple live-reading weather station into a more capable archival machine. It will then give us the opportunity to make predictions based not only on what’s happening right now, but also on what happened in the past.