Natalie was very generous to me this year and bought me an Ecowitt GW2001 Wittboy 7-in-1 weather station. My previous La Crosse got beaten up, and I’ve wanted a station from which I could export and post data. The Wittboy fits the bill exactly, connected through wifi to my home router, and published automatically. Data for all the various measurements can also be exported to a spreadsheet, which got me thinking.

I’ve spent some time over the holidays fiddling with the export to see how it could add a layer of information to my ride videos. While it’s not on board with me while I ride, it could still be useful to know what the weather is like at at least one point on that ride, so in the video above I’ve added gauges for wind speed, wind direction, and temperature.

It took a bit of work. I use Telemetry Overlay to create the data layer, and it very flexibly handles .csv files to create custom gauges and visualizations. But, the Wittboy exports .xls. After conversion, Telemetry Overlay is also looking for some very specific column headers, and the date/time format needs to be precise. So, before importing the weather data into the telemetry software, it needs to be converted to that .csv format, and the column containing the timestamp correctly formatted and headed. That’s all fairly easy, but I’m not sure how often I’ll do that if I’m in a rush.

There are some caveats. I actually used another weather station I found on the weather map to do this video since I didn’t have December 10 data. But when I start using mine, the wind data will need to be taken with a grain of salt. The station is in my backyard and fairly sheltered, with some big buildings between it and the predominant winds.

Finally, just for fun, at 1:49 watch for a freeze frame as I pass Jan van der Fiets. I thought it would be neat to use Strava’s fly-by feature to capture anyone else using Strava along the way.

I do love the holidays. Nerd time. Enjoy some drone footage of my weather station.