Two of the biggest barriers to having a personal weather station in your backyard have just disappeared. BloomSky’s SKY1 ($249.00 for the solar powered kit, soon to be supplanted by the SKY2 being funded by a Kickstarter campaign) is a remarkably fun and useful app-attached weather station that’s not only inexpensive, but easy to set up as well. In this review, I’ll take a look at this spherical weather station/webcam and its capabilities, and where its successor (SKY2 with STORM) may make up for a few inadequacies.
Design
When it comes to personal weather stations, you can’t beat the design of the SKY1 and SKY2 — they’re relatively small, designed like little ‘bots that keep an eye on the sky and the current weather conditions. The spherical body of the SKY1 sits atop a spike that can be simply inserted into the ground, or placed into an optional mount that can be screwed to a wall or other vertical surface. Power is provided by either plugging the SKY1 in every once in a while (it will tell you when it needs a charge), or by a set of solar panels that just need to be aimed in the general direction of south.
The device connects to the world on 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi (no 5GHz) and range appears to be quite good. Mine is about as far away from the Wi-Fi router as it can be and still be on my residential lot, yet it sends readings and images steadily with no hesitation.
Key to the design of the overall BloomSky package is the iPhone app, which was updated in the process of writing this review. It’s quite simple to use the app to set up a new SKY1 or SKY2, provides both data from your personal weather station and others in the area, and will also display a list of favorite weather stations around the world. One thing that would be nice in the app is a way to look at past data in graphical form — just about every other weather app I can think of has that capability. I’d also like to see the app expanded to both iPad and Apple Watch. It would be so cool to pull up the current weather and sky image on my wrist!
“iPhone 2016 release: week of September 12th,” he wrote on Twitter. “Just to clarify, this refers to the retail release, not the launch event. To be even more specific, it should happen on Friday, Sept. 16th.”
The rumor mills is churning with rumors about the upcoming iPhone (shown in fanciful mock-ups). Will it offer a two-model line-up or a three-model line-up, including an “iPad Pro” (I’m predicting only two models)? Will it lack a traditional audio jack or note (I’m saying it will)? Will it be waterproof and dust proof or not (I’m saying yes to both features)?
The latest rumor says it will be dubbed the iPhone 6SE rather than the iPhone 7. However, I’m still betting it will be called the latter.
Creative Kit 2016: Six powerful Mac photography apps with over 500 creative tools
