Review: Archos Weather Station

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The Archos Weather Station is another step into the Connected Home of the future. It measures the weather in your house, outdoors as well as checks the temperature and moisture levels in your soil. It presents all the gathered data to you in a nice format via a connected app, that you can access from anywhere in the world.

It consists of a base station, an outdoor station and a soil module.

Indoor Module

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The base station sits at home, and you don’t really have a choice as it needs to be connected via mains. It measures the temperature, the air quality (CO2 ppm), atmospheric pressure, humidity and noise indoors. This makes it the ideal device to check the quality of the environment in your living spaces.

While all the information is presented in detail over the app, the basic air quality is presented in terms of colours (red, yellow, green) letting you know how low the CO2 is.

The same LED blinks blue to let you know about connectivity when you are trying to pair the device.

Pairing is a fairly simple process. You download the Archos Weather app, search for the device using Bluetooth, and once found, you enter the Wifi Password into it. After that, the device is disconnected from your phone (Bluetooth), and all future communication is done via the internet. This means that you can access the data presented from anywhere in the world. After pairing and setup, you add extra modules such as the outdoor module and the soil module. While I didn’t have more of them to try and pair, I imagine only one of each can be added in the app.

One of the best things about this is that the noise level alert can also serve as a security device. You will know if somebody is around your living space at a certain time.

Outdoor Module

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The Outdoor Module runs on 2 AA batteries, which were provided with the device. It measures temperature and humidity, and contains a bracket that can be hung on to any nail/screw.

Since the device has survived rain and stormy conditions, I can vouch for the fact that it can deal with outdoor conditions very well.

I would advise to put it in an area of permanent shade though, as of course a shiny sun can seriously affect the temperature readings on this device.

Soil Module

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The Soil Module is what makes this device different to rest of the lot. It does exactly the same as the outdoor module, but giving you humidity and temperature readings of your soil. Unlike the outdoor or indoor modules though, you get wet, very wet, or dry rather than an exact percentage of humidity. It works though, for soil.

It is definitely a good way to know when you need to water your plants, though in the UK the soil often goes through wet patches over months. However, a thing to note is that a lot of our plantation is used to water, and any amount of dry weather will cause them to die, so once again, use this to your advantage!

Since this is accessible over the internet, you can also check when you are on holiday, and ask a friendly neighbour to go water your plants!

One of the things I did notice with the soil module was that at times there were ‘gaps’ in the data. There was no real pattern to it, and you would miss an hour or so of data, but it always carried on from that.

The app

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The app brings all the data together for your perusal. It indicates all the measured values, and can show you logs and graphs of everything. It is presented in a simple and clear way, and I can’t really complain about it.

If I had to be picky, the weather it predicts (for the next few days) wasn’t very accurate, and that depends mostly on what service they have subscribed to.

It is available on both iOS and Android.

More information

You can find out more about the Archos Weather Station on their website:

http://www.archos.com/gb/products/objects/chome/aws/

If the website takes you to a ‘Choose country’ option, just find it under ‘Connected Objects’.

It generally retails for £99 (Amazon), though better deals can be found.

Verdict

A good looking product that fits well with your decor and gives you a good set of numbers, specially if you are into gardening.

 

2 thoughts on “Review: Archos Weather Station”

  1. Archos weather station does not work at all any more. U only get an error message. Archos knows about it and does not care. It currently withdraw the product from the online store, but what about the existing product base? Big fail, Archos! Would never buy any Archos product again.

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