airfield-wx

A self-hosted weather station for your own airstrip: build a small sensor, run a little server on your home network, and get a cockpit-style readout of the conditions at your field — density altitude, wind and the favored runway, altimeter setting, and (when you have internet) the nearest METAR.

⚠ UNOFFICIAL — NOT FOR FLIGHT PLANNING

airfield-wx is backyard sensor data plus nearby public reports. It is not a substitute for an official preflight briefing or current METAR/TAF, and it performs no go/no-go automation. You are the pilot in command. Observations only — no forecasting.

Is this for you?

If you fly out of — or just love — a strip that has no weather station of its own, this gives you a live picture of the air over your field:

• Density altitude, the number that decides how your airplane will actually perform today.
• Your own wind, turned into a runway solution — which end is favored, and the headwind and crosswind on it.
• Altimeter setting (QNH) and temperature/dewpoint, measured at your field.
• The nearest airport, its runways, and magnetic variation, found automatically from GPS — no typing in coordinates, and it works with no internet.

You don't need to be a programmer. There's a demo you can try in five minutes (below) before you buy a single part. New to the terminal or to any of the aviation terms? The install guide walks you through it gently, and the glossary explains every term in plain language.

What it looks like

▶ Try the live demo — airfield-wx-demo.vercel.app

Click through the dashboard in your browser, no setup required. It's simulated data for a fictional field ("DEMO / Example Field") — nothing live or measured — with a scenario switcher for a clear (VFR) day, a marginal (MVFR) day, and the feed-offline state. Like the product, it's UNOFFICIAL — not for flight planning.

The dashboard reads like a panel instrument. Cyan numbers are measured at your field; violet is internet-sourced (the METAR). Full dashboard tour →

On your phone — where you'll actually use it, at the hangar or run-up — the panels stack into a single readable column. The offline behavior is even clearer here: the violet METAR panel dims to "NO FEED" while every cyan local panel stays bright and live.

  

What you'll need

A small sensor	An ESP32 board + a BME280 (temp/humidity/pressure) + a GPS module + an anemometer (wind). Wires onto a perfboard; no soldering wizardry required.
A computer to run the server	A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is plenty — or any Ubuntu/Debian box, or even your laptop to start. It lives on your home network; no cloud, no accounts.
Rough cost	About $100–250 of parts, mostly depending on the anemometer (a budget SparkFun kit vs. a rugged Davis 6410).
Rough effort	An afternoon to wire and flash the sensor; the server is a handful of copy-paste commands.

Full parts list, wiring, pinout, and the one calibration step are in the hardware & build guide.

Try it in 5 minutes (no hardware)

git clone https://github.com/kbennett2000/airfield-wx.git
cd airfield-wx
make install        # creates the server's environment and installs it
make dev            # starts the server in demo mode on port 8005

Then open http://localhost:8005/dashboard/. It comes up with realistic sample data so you can explore the whole instrument before any sensor exists. When you're ready for real readings, edit server/weather.toml (comment out the [development] block and set your sensor's address) — the install & configuration guide walks through every step, terminal and all.

(For a permanent, runs-at-boot install with a systemd service + firewall: sudo ./install.sh — see the install guide.)

Why it keeps working when the internet doesn't

Your field's own readings never depend on a network. If the internet feed drops, only the violet (internet-sourced) METAR panel dims — every cyan local panel (density altitude, altimeter, wind, the runway solution) stays bright and keeps updating. That asymmetry is deliberate, and it's the heart of the design.

Architecture (in brief)

For the technically inclined:

• One source of truth: a read-only, versioned HTTP API under /api/v1/. Every client (dashboard, tray widget) polls the same endpoints — no per-client math.
• Everything is a read-time derivation off the current reading; nothing you fly by needs history. So history logging is opt-in and off by default — the station is stateless out of the box (the /history and /summary endpoints simply 404). Turn on [logging] only if you want the dashboard trend chart and the daily summary; raw readings are then stored and every derived value is still computed at read time (bug fixes apply retroactively — no backfill).
• Offline-first: the server starts and serves with no internet. The only thing that differs online vs offline is the optional external (METAR/model) block.
• Provenance is visible: cyan = your LOCAL sensors (always live); violet = internet-sourced (may be absent, and dims when the feed is gone). See the dashboard tour.

The outdoor suite is BME280 + GPS + anemometer (no light sensor — sky/cloud come from METAR). The anemometer can mount three ways (all-in-one, a remote anemometer on a cable, or an opt-in separate wind station); a config knob selects the source and a freshness guard nulls stale wind so a dead sensor never reads as current. Details and the trade-offs are in the hardware guide and ADR-0006.

Documentation

• Hardware & build — parts, ESP32 pinout, wiring, flashing, vane calibration, siting, the three mounting topologies.
• Install & configuration — a gentle terminal on-ramp, the demo path, the systemd service, and every weather.toml setting.
• Dashboard tour — how to read the instrument, panel by panel.
• Verification checklist — how to know it's working, end to end.
• Glossary — every aviation and computing term, in plain language.
• Future work — what's deliberately deferred, and why.
• Design docs and architecture decisions — the why behind the build (offline-first, local-first wind, the unofficial stance).

Licensing & attribution

• airfield-wx is MIT-licensed. It is built on a copy of weather-station-public (MIT, same author) — an aviation variant, not a fork.
• Airport / runway data: OurAirports — public domain.
• Magnetic variation: the WMM2025 model via pygeomag (MIT); the WMM coefficients are public domain (NOAA/NCEI + BGS).
• METAR: aviationweather.gov (FAA/NWS), keyless.

Self-hosted, LAN-only, no accounts, no cloud, no ads.