So yeah, I’ve been kinda ignoring my little blog, after spending a lot of time getting it running. Why? Well, because it’s tough right now. <waves hands>

I did finally manage to get my certs for this site to auto update, I think. I’ll know for sure on the next expiration date.

I’ve either hit dead ends or ran out of mental bandwidth for my projects:

The Hello Birdie cam breakdown has reached the limits of my knowledge and has been frustrating to try and make any progress. I am learning somethings about reverse engineering and how to go about digging into it, but it’s so sloooow going

The Eufy cam worked well enough, but not for the purpose I wanted, which was backyard wildlife. It’s AI just looked for people and cars. If I set it for plain old motion detection, it would even pick up rain drops.

I did get my weather station up, running, and feeding Weather Underground’s system. I had the north-south axis of the station 180 degrees out initially (oops). The station is somewhat shielded by a tree, so depending on the wind direction, my rain gauge can read low.

In the process of building an ADU (Auxiliary Dwelling Unit) for my mom-in-law to move into. She’s got some mobility issues but is very independent, hence her own space. After she’s done using it, it will become a home office for my husband, and even later, maybe a place to rent out for a single college student. Hopefully, it will be done by mid-August (fingers crossed).

That’s it for now!

So I bought a WiFi enabled personal weather station from Acurite. It was a bit pricier than some other personal weather stations available from Acurite and others, but I feel it had the better specifications overall than what was available otherwise.

Since this was going on my network, I wanted to make sure things looked on the up and up, so create a test network and packet sniff it is. And what I difference I found between the weather station and the Hello Birdie camera.

Quick little primer on the Atlas weather station: It uses a 900 MHz radio to connect from the sensor assembly to the local display. The local display has a ESP-WROOM-02 (datasheet here) to act as a bridge from the display to the WiFi connection. You don’t need the WiFi connection, and the local display will work fine without it. The purpose of the WiFi is to send data to WeatherUnderground.

When you first power up the display, it creates an open AP. You join this AP to set the SSID and password so the display can join the network and send its data. The config webpage is very simple: just a pulldown for found WiFi networks and a password field.

Running Nmap, the only port active at the setup stage is a http daemon at port 80. Once the display is configured on the Wifi, that port goes away and no open ports were found. It doesn’t even respond to pings.

Snooping the traffic, the only sites the display accesses is pool.ntp.org and three sites within the myacurite.com.domain. This is all done a clients where the display makes the requests. All this thing does is get the current time, look for firmware updates, try to send the weather data to your myacurite account (if you create one, not mandatory). All this traffice is sent via TLS ver 1.2.

Since I’m only playing with this inside the house right now, I haven’t gotten a WeatherUnderground account yet, but if what I see holds, I expect that will be just one more domain and comms over TLS.

Big difference in the privacy aspect of this weather station and the Hello Birdie camera is like day and night.

I downloaded a copy of the firmware from the site indicated in the traffic capture, but really expect no surprises whenever I get around to looking at it.

The only bummer that I see right now is that short of using a SDR to pull the weather data off the 900MHz signal, there’s no way of getting the data out and using for my own purposes locally.

Hey there!

I’m just getting things started, so there isn’t much of anything to see as of yet. I’ll eventually get some stuff up about anime, manga, and music I like. I’ll also post some about the little projects I do to try and keep myself busy, such as my home/lab network, Arduino stuff, and reverse engineering (which I’m just getting started with). Got Big Plans™ for a bunch of stuff, but we’ll see how it goes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯