I've opened up the humidity sensor to circuit board level, I've taken a couple of photo's but they ont really show enough for them to be much good, They don't show chip id's for example. THe Spinning cup sensor seems to require a little more surgery to get into it ( You seem to have to remove a circlip from the end of the spinning shaft to go any further and I wasn't keen to do that) . I'll probably add some form of external power supply so I won't have to revisit the unit when it's up on the old aerial on my roof but that's for the weekend.
It really all depends how simple or complex the radio packets are. If it just blurts away shouting out a set of readings every few seconds then that is probably very 'easy' ( if you know how to do it
) to simply receive the signal extract the data from the carrier, seperate the data from it's headers and footers and whatever else they sling in there. Then discover which chunk of data corresponds to which sensor and then present that data as some form of interface that could be used by something else.
Personnally I think it might well be a receiver chip, a small PIC with an RS232 output. That would allow it to be read by low level stuff easily, like other PIC chips rather than try to encapsulate it all into a One-wire solution, which seems to be emerging as one of our defacto standards. The radio decoding of the time signal seems to be performed in the humidity sensor. That's great because it means we get very accurate time keeping cheaply, and that is a serious problem, easily addressed.
Once things start to slow up round here I'll probably start looking at it, but for the moment my main concern is getting all this much talked about kit up on the wall and up on the aerial post without it all falling off, me falling off or having to revisit it at some time in the near future.
It certainly looks viable.
