Can I turn my phone into a weather station?

February 14, 2016 4:11 PM

I have a gen 1 Moto G. It works fine, but the screen is heavily cracked (although still usable). I want to turn it into something that will tell me and also show me the weather conditions at the location it's sited at. Is this a thing that can be done?

It's currently running Android 4.4, but it can be upgraded to 5.something, I'm sure. In an ideal world, I'd be able to see internal/external temperatures and also see an image of what is going on outside. This doesn't need to be live video, one image every 15 minutes would be quite sufficient.

I'm familiar with Netatmo, but it's pretty expensive and means buying new hardware. I have a small budget, but £130 is way outside of that. And it doesn't take photographs. I'm hoping that there's some kind of USB adapter thing I can plug in and run from an app, but I'm open to suggestions.

posted by Solomon to Technology (2 answers total)

Can you clarify your specs a little? Is this a long term or short term solution - i.e. can it run from the battery or do you need the USB port free to power the phone? Is there wifi at the remote location?

It may well be cheaper to get something designed for this purpose (or a little weather station and a web cam).

Here is a headphone jack temperature sensor option.
posted by ssg at 6:14 PM on February 14, 2016

Response by poster: No wifi, but there is a reasonable 3g connection I can use. By reasonable, I mean that video is a non-starter, but uploading an image (and the presumably few lines of text containing the current temperature) shouldn't tax it very much. I can charge the phone up once a week-ish, which should be sufficient and would leave the USB port free.

The Thermodo device looks very interesting, but I also stumbled across the BeeWi today. Bluetooth would mean I could leave the phone plugged in and charging. There are loads of time lapse apps on the Play store, too. Dropbox has a feature called Camera Upload that will automatically upload pictures taken on the phone, too.
posted by Solomon at 11:35 AM on February 15, 2016