Unfortunately, the BloomSky SKY2 device stopped working.  I had a couple of times were it stopped but assumed it was the battery going dead.  I contacted technical support and they suggested I do a hard reset.  It worked for a few more days before it wouldn’t do anything if I clicked the buttons.  Technical support was good about offering to send a replacement.  For the first few days, it is working fine but time will tell.

After trying to mount the BloomSky directly on my backyard trellis post, I got another treated board and screwed it into the the top of the trellis.  One additional benefit was the solar panel would be facing the south.

At first, I was going to use the screw on the BloomSky mount to hold it in place.  It seemed to work fine but then started getting worried about wind.  So, I found a small board and screwed that to the treated board and then add screws into the mount and both boards.  That seemed to make more secure for wind.

I liked the resulting image much better.  There was a nice horizon line.  The wifi seemed to still work too.  I will have to monitor to see how everything works in this final mounting location.

BloomSky has a blog called Weatherlution.  One of the posts was about how to use the BloomSky with IFTTT.   IFTTT is short for  “if this, then that”.  I had heard about it before but never had a reason to use it.  BloomSky had created some recipes on IFTTT so I decided to take a look.

• There were a number to share share a picture of the day or the time-lapse on Twitter or Facebook.
• There was one to send rain notification to your email.  I tried this one but immediately turn it off.  When it started raining one day, I got the first message and then a number of additional ones.  It was still raining so that made sense but wish there was some sort of delay between emails.
• There was one to write to a Google Spreadsheet when new data comes in.  I tried this one but wasn’t sure what I could do with the data besides just recording it.  It was just the raw data dump.  I found in the dashboard where you could download the data but that command didn’t look like it had a date range but then realized it just exported what the display was so you could set the date range there.
• The one I was most interested in was the ability to save the daily time-lapse to Dropbox or OneDrive.  I was thinking it might work to post the image to my blog automatically similarly to what I do with my current weather camera.  However, the time-lapse stopped working so not sure what is up there.

Overall, the integration with IFTTT looked very interesting but sort of limited.  The data seems to be there but the actions seem limited.

I took the defaults when adding the device to the BloomSky app.  After the device was added, I looked at the app.  There were three menu options:  Favorite, Explore and Menu.   Favorite was used to add Favorite devices but just opened the Explore command.  Explore allowed you to use a map interface to move around looking for other devices and add them as favorites.

Menu had a number of settings:

• Account
• Set picture
• Device
• Set Name
• Set notification for public, rain and battery
• Notifications
• Set notification and hide Global WeatherBuzz