Open-Meteo or a local station: choosing your weather source
Start free, then decide when local sensors will add meaningful precision to your PiSky installation.
PiSky supports two weather sources, and you can switch between them at any time without losing your station's recorded history.
Open-Meteo: free, no hardware required
Open-Meteo is active by default and uses the coordinates already configured for your station. It's a good starting point for any installation — you get current conditions and a seven-day forecast with no extra hardware and no API key. Because it's a regional forecast rather than a sensor on your roof, it won't capture hyperlocal variation like a microclimate in a valley or a specific wind corridor.
A local station: real sensors, real precision
Connecting a compatible station over WeeWX gets you genuinely hyperlocal, real-time
conditions — temperature, wind, pressure and rain measured at your exact location. PiSky's
guided setup supports Ecowitt/Fine Offset gateways, Weather Underground-compatible clients, and
ObserverIP/Ambient/Fine Offset bridges, all configured from the browser without editing
weewx.conf over SSH.
Which should you choose?
If you already own a compatible station, connect it — you'll get more accurate, more frequent readings than any regional forecast can provide. If you don't, Open-Meteo is a genuinely capable default, and you can always add a station later — PiSky's daily archive keeps recording either way. See the weather configuration reference for the full setup walkthrough.