Thursday, December 31, 2015

Bloomsky Review Update: Much better

In September I published a review of the Bloomsky Weather Station, which I summarized with "a nice toy with brilliant hardware and rubbish software.".

My main complaint was that it was impossible to share an URL of the station and to get to the data, photos and images in any way.

Today all of this has changed.

Now there is a map with all the stations, and each station has it's own URL like mine for example. It includes the current data and webcam image and last timelapse.





This will already make most people happy, but they didn't stop there. Now every user has his own private dashboard with access to previous timelapses and historical data.


historical data
The historical data gives you nice graphs for the available period and also has a table view with the detailed information.
The feedback of the graphs can be a bit slow especially if you choose a large time span, but it does look really pretty and gives you a quick overview about the weather changes in a longer time frame.

timelapses
The timelapses view is straight forward, you can see a calendar with the available timelapses and you can download the one from the selected date. No bulk download yet as far as I can see.





And finally, for people who want to have even better access to this and want to integrate it into their environment, there is now an IFTTT channel and an API.


I haven't played with the API yet, but I have created two IFTTT recipes for my station: one uploads the latest timelapse to google drive (which I did manually from the app previously) and a second one, which copies all data into a google spreadsheet, this was not possible before.

So, to conclude: the software has caught up with the hardware and I now can highly recommend the Bloomsky Station for anyone interested in a webcam / weather station combination.



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