After their successful crowdfunding campaign with the SKY personal weather camera station, the team is back again with version 2 renamed as Sky 2 and Storm. While the Sky 2 serves the purpose of a second generation weather camera station. The Storm is an all new accessory device measuring total rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, and UV. Sky 2 will measure the more conventional weather details such as Temperature, Humidity, Barometric Pressure and Precipitation. At the heart of it, SKY2 features an HD camera capturing real-time images every 5 minutes. You’ll have a time-lapse video at the end of each day, telling a clear story of your sky. To add to this is the BloomSky APP that will serve as your free mobile control center for sharing and viewing valuable weather information. The interface intuitively displays collected data from your devices, so you have on-demand access to real-time conditions. Identifying weather changes will be easy with this camera system by your side, don’t you think?
Via Kickstarter
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aug. 30., 2016 : successful funding, incl. confirmation mail on the mounts and tripods.
After chasing:
jul 20th, 2017 : mid august delivery for EU/US backers
aug 17th (mid august) : BS needs to check if mounts and tripods for the backers of Kickstarter are put in the system for processing..
'I am very sorry for the confusion. I should have clarified. I do not have future delivery dates at this moment, but I would like to check to make sure that the backers order was processed correctly, is in the system and ready to be processed.' This can be read in this thread : https://bloomsky.desk.com/customer/en/portal/questions/17123669-storm-and-mount-availability…
One remark from BS there was ´yeah…I got burned on that one too. I am sorry. It looks like US and EU mounts will be arriving early August.´
I´ve asked to update Kickstarter, which got ´I will see what I can do about getting an update out.´
Against my better judgement in I've started to build the BS units into working order. Better judgement will be explained below.
The units have been operational for a week now, but I've recently started to use domotica software at home which can incorporate BS data. Via Weather Underground api's I now can see what's happening outside (I'm lazy, I know :-)) Connectivity: WiFi is an tricky thing: I see the sky2 every 5 mins requesting an ip adres. Depending on the type of dhcp server (router, dedicated server) it could be that this 'wears out' and then the connection is lost (need then to reset the dhcp server). This I haven't experienced yet but is my experience as an IT guy. What I did experience though is that the Sky stopped connecting and spontaneously reconnected after about 9 hours. No clue what happened as I only have the logs from my network which basically told me the device was gone and came back after X hours. The 2.4GHz antenna of the SK2 is not very powerful so the distance between the router/AP and SKy2 is somewhat limited.
The Storm hub runs I asume on the 868MHz band. I need to place it in a 90 degree angle towards the storm or I lose connection over less than 30 mtrs. Power: Like all backers outside the US I have the useless power adapters. I charged the Sky2 via the solar panels which actually worked. The battery level can be read from the application or portal and it took almost 3 days to reach the 100%, but since then it stayed on the 100% level (Which I don't trust, as the unit will use some power during the night and some decrease to say 95% or lower can be expected). We recently had quite some sunshine so I need to wait till lower conditions to see what this does with the power indicator. According to BS the unit should be able to run 2 weeks on a fully charged battery.
The Storm shows more a expected power drainage during the day (the panel is also weaker so this is logical)
The Storm hub : this I fixed using the tip from one backer below: power the hub via the USB connection and a 5V usb phone charger. Mounts : the extra mounts are still 'underway' (Sure, that's BS BS) so I used the included wall mount of the SKy2 to attached it to a fence. For the Storm I initially didn't do anything, just pushed the thing into the ground but then realized the fun is at higher altitudes. I used the hollow rod of a paint roller and fixated this to the fence and put the Storm in it. This helps to get a good direction of the solar panel and have the meter into the wind. If I consider the application for smartphone and the portal of bloomsky : these units are way to expensive for what the app and portal deliver. Also you are only able to do measurements near a network access, meaning in most cases a home and thus influencing the measurements. You can get better forecasts cheaper and easier. But if you go for the tech/nerd factor : having these balls is just fun. Blinking lights, moving wind thingies and of course SOLAR POWER .... Ok, then about my better judgement.
What I think is somewhat worrying is that even though you bought the balls you will be fully depending on BS. All data, images etc. will be send to BS, and you will need their application, their (internet)connectivity and their databases to access and interpret your data. What I now see after a week of using the BS balls is that I pump out to the internet the temp, power, rain etc. etc to BS. Then via a connection between BS and weather underground I get that data back... but only in portion of max 5 mins (as I don't pay for the weather underground api, I only can have 500 calls a day). The connection between Weather underground and BS is not stable to say the least. I pump out a huge amount of data from my BS Balls and only get slices back. I have cheap cresta temp/humidity sensors in house who bombard my server with data and what can be stored by me, every few seconds.
Then my biggest concern: I think it can be in the future that BS will charge some amount of money to have access to your data... so you end up with collecting data for them for free and then you have to pay to see what you did. I hope this is a complete misconception from my side, but if I look in the background how their site works (eg. obfuscation of links where data or pictures are stored) and the fact that BS is the only place where you can store the data I expect some changes in their businessmodel in the future. TL;DR Summary:
Power adapters I don't need, solar panels work at this moment. Connection via Wifi works though the SKy2 wifi is not that strong, so a large distance between units and house/office/network is not possible. BS applications (smartphone and portal) are very rudimentary and could be more configurable. VIA VIA you can integrate the data into eg. Wunderstation of Weather underground or Domoticz. Connections between BS and other parties can be cumbersome so real time data is not an option.
Don't want you having to wait for one from BS :D
unfortunately as expected the power plug is not for NZ, an issue the creators have been aware of since their first device - and something they will surely have to fix if they are serious about this deal they have with metservice.
Not sure who the sherlock was that decided it was a good idea to market something globally but only provide parts for one country, I'm sure it wouldn't have cost many more cents to provide a universal plug setup - just like every other small electrical appliance you buy now.
When I find a solution to how to plug this thing in to get it going I will find out whether I got a working one or not I guess.
We are currently awaiting the complimentary mounts to be received at the warehouse. unfortunately, I have not gotten an update for a week or two. I do know that they are coming by sea so they are slow moving. I will try to find out where they are today. I apologize about that delay.
-- Never heard from him again.
JUN 22, 2017 05:10PM PDT
BloomSky Agent
Hello Lucy, I did have a small update. I heard that the mounts have left the manufacturers and are making their way on over. They are traveling by sea, but, should be in our warehouse soon. Unfortunately, no dates were mentioned, just that the mounts had left. Thanks again
my SKY always shows temperature Celsius negative, so instead of 35 Grad Celsius -35 Grad Celsius. Can you please give me a hint? I found nothing on the FAQ. Thanks!
Issue I have is that the power supply adaptors are US only (told this is a US product only), anyone know where to get ones that fit Aus style plugs?
I have same problem like yours。
Ive had no trouble with storm dongle, up to about 20-25m thru multiple walls.
Arnaud from France.
https://bloomsky.desk.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2584174-iphone-7-bug Mine's not working, but not sure if it's something I'm doing or the above bug from 2016 that appears to not be fixed...