Troubleshooting and Hacking the Ambient Weather WS-0900 Weather Station

For Christmas I received the Ambient Weather WS-0900-IP Wireless Internet Remote Monitoring Weather Station.  This little unit is a great way to setup your own personal weather station, which as a bonus allows you to access the data over the Internet.

So, after setting up the unit, and playing with it for a while, I got the urge to start hacking it.  I found out that you can access the device over telnet.  The built-in controller has a limited set of commands, and unfortunately on this model, does not really have much utility.  After playing around with various commands to try and redirect the units update from weather underground to my own servers, I accidently used the fwupdate command which wiped out the units ROM.

Lesson learned, don’t mess around with stuff unless you are ok breaking it!  After a bit, I was able to work out the following procedure for reloading a valid firmware.

This is the proper fix if your  IP Observer is not connecting.  In this case, only the Power, Link and ACT lights are lit blue on the unit, and the ObserverIP module does not communicate to the server, and you cannot access the unit via the built-in web server.   This state will require that the firmware be reloaded.

  • Download the latest firmware here:  http://www.AmbientWeather.com/observerip.html 
  • Turn off the power to  the ObserverIP module however leave it connected to your network. 
  • Launch the IP Tools.   Because the ObserverIP module is turned off, you will not be able to locate it on your network, but continue anyway. 
  • Select the Upgrade button in IP Tools. 
  • Select the Select File button, and browse to the location of the file you downloaded in Step 1. 
  • Select the Upgrade Firmware button. 
  • Plug in the ObserverIP module. The software will locate the device on your network and begin the update.  The dialog box will display Received a Read Request from the ObserverIP module. A green progress bar will provide you with the upgrade status. 
  • Once the firmware upgrade is complete, the dialog box will display Read session is completed successfully.
  • Wait about one minute for the ObserverIP module to reboot, and then access the web server.

You should have a restored fully functioning unit!  I still have not been able to redirect the weather updates to another server.  In my unit, a WS-0900 with the 3.0.8 version it appear that the server that it connects to is a hard coded IP address.  Leave a message here if you have found a way to make this work.

4 thoughts on “Troubleshooting and Hacking the Ambient Weather WS-0900 Weather Station

  1. Mike A.

    It works now with Firmware 4.14 Just put the ip address or domain name of the server you wish to send data to.

  2. Chico

    Hey, thanks…I had updated to 4.5.1 and it somewhat bricked the unit, as you described above. I couldn’t communicated with it and it wouldn’t respond to pings. But your procedure allowed it to be revived to an older fw version. Thanks!

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