To be generous, this solution 'outperforms' commercial weather APIs for exactly one hyperlocal geographic location, and underperforms on 99.999999% of the remaining locations that may also be experiencing weather of some sort.

There's a magical world out there where Tuya leave us with the ability to OTA flash custom firmware of we have physical access, and then we can all just run ESPHome on private wifi networks.

With respect, this misses some important constraints. Scale it to thousands of locations and target 99% SLA. Now you have a maintenance problem in remote physical places, requirements for hardware reliability, subcontractors to manage, need a reliable network connectivity, etc. You also need to collect and redistribute the data (API or whatever) - while this is a trivial problem today, still you incur costs for hosting, network, etc. While I actually agree with the sentiment, it is not just a $3 sensor either.

Uk weather office has a similar effort apparently - select registered sites and disable the official ones here:

https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/

Interesting to see that it gets many submissions from outside UK too

No, the tool rtl_433 repackages payload data in json for easier downstream consumption.

If you live in a moderately dense area or know a neighbor who also has a weather station, you might try the command line utility rtl_433[0] mentioned in the article with an SDR dongle to pick up existing broadcasts in your area. I pick up three different stations consistently!

[0]https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433

The very first cable weather "channel" was a large circular base at least 4' diameter (don't remember exact size, but big) that had various full size gauges on it. A camera was positioned to look down on the gauge under it. The whole table top rotated so that each gauge would continuously cycle under the camera. When you viewed the channel, you'd have to wait until the gauge you wanted to see rotated back around.

For even more retro points, have the UI presented by WeatherStar! https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com/

I get the sense from the article that part of the fun was doing this via radio frequencies rather than having to deal with a network.

> At this point, we've connected the Temu weather station to the Internet and the ham radio network. Anyone with an APRS-enabled radio, digipeater, receiver, or just a web browser can see what the temperature and humidity are at my house.

Nearly all off the shelf weather station parts use 433Mhz or similar bands. It’s likely that if you have any preexisting wireless temp sensors, etc that transmit to an indoor display, you can use those with a system like this. I also think that range and battery life is better for these simpler sensors.

links? the closest thing is 10x the price, some are more like $80, some $180

Man, the interesting bits like decoding the radio signals to temperature isn't even in the article.

Also, the temperature measurement is probably not accurate to 2 decimal places, but the "toot" converts 7.2 C to 44.96 F. Someone needs to learn about significant digits.

All this device ever does is publish results, so it’s not clear what interacting directly would mean

Yes.