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A hobby project, not client work
I have a Tempest weather station in the garden. It has been sending a reading every minute since January 2024, and I wanted more from it than the phone app shows. So I built WeatherMate, a small app that runs on my PC.
It listens to the station on the home network, keeps every reading in a small database on the PC, and fills in anything it missed from the Tempest cloud. That is about 1.4 million readings so far.
What it does
- Live readings, with a barometer forecast and the Tempest forecast
- A calendar of every day since January 2024, and charts for any period
- Records: hottest, coldest, wettest, strongest gust, dry spells and frost dates
- Alerts on the PC or by email for frost, gales, heavy rain, lightning and new records
- A short weather email each morning, if I want one
Checking the data before trusting it
The part I enjoyed most is the same habit I use at work: don't trust the data until you have checked it. WeatherMate has a health page that tests each sensor against what it should be reading. It found that the light sensor reading had jumped in February 2026 with nothing changed at the station. The readings showed Tempest had changed its light calibration five times since then, so WeatherMate now logs those changes and leaves the faulty values out of the records.
It is a weekend project, but it uses the same ideas as my Salesforce work: data from a device, rules that turn it into something useful, and alerts that reach a person at the right time.