Once he was tapped into the feed coming from the radio, the final step was writing some code for the ESP8266 that could listen on the line, interpret the data packets, and push the resulting variables out over the network.

Since he already decoded the packets on the RF side, he knew exactly what he was looking for with his oscilloscope and logic analyzer. But looking to push his skills to the next level, decided to open up the base station and isolate its receiver. Now at this point, he could have pulled the data right out of the air with his RTL-SDR. But he at least had enough to move onto the next step. Each one of these was a small puzzle in itself, and in the end, there’s still a few bits which he hasn’t quite figured out. was able to lock onto the signal and piece together the data packets that reported variables such as temperature, wind speed, and rainfall. The first phase of this project involved an RTL-SDR receiver, GNURadio, and a sprinkling of Python.

Looking to bridge the gap and bring all that local climate data onto the Internet, decided to reverse engineer how his weather station worked. There’s no shortage of cheap weather stations on the market that pull in data from several wireless sensors running in the 433 to 900 MHz range and present you with a slick little desktop display, but that’s usually where the flow of information stops.

Home weather station wunderground