Just some brain fart. Many false rain alerts come from birds landing on top of the unit. Many of those could be prevented by checking the brightness sensor for a sudden drop of say 20%. Now that might also be a cloud, but if you make at a user selectable option to enable this suppression, some people would be happy (an option because some people depend on having the very first drop reported). I would be happy.
For the tempest owners there might be an even better way:
When there would be some other brightness sensor it could compare the two. Sudden drop in brightness for the top one but not for the other one, means it is most likely a bird. The unit doesn’t have a second sensor, but the tempest does have a solar panel. Perhaps that could be used as the second brightness sensor. @dsj
even without the solar panel this might be a useful idea that deserves a spot on the list. But if it possible to sample the solar panel output as well, it might work even better on tempest so you are really sure it is a bird. (but please when you start implementing this, make it work for the Sky unit as well). As an option I don’t mind losing a couple drops of rain, if it prevents false rain alert.
We can’t use the solar panel to help this because we don’t have the high temporal resolution of the solar panel voltage that we’d need (and that we have in the solar radiation / UV sensor)
Thats why I suggested a means to report verified false positives years ago. The heptic sensor footprint of the false event would be logged allowing it to eventually learn what is a bird and what is a rain drop. Of course that sounds simple in theory, I am sure it wouldn’t work like that in practice!