Tide Stationdigital WiFi tide clock

Tide Station needs a NOAA tide station to watch, and those live on US coasts, the Gulf, and tidal rivers and bays. For lake people or landlocked dreamers it still works beautifully watching a favorite coastal spot (the beach they visit every summer, say), but for local conditions inland, the weather station is the better gift.

Tide Station is a digital tide clock: it reads live water level from NOAA’s sensors instead of approximating one. A mechanical tide clock runs a 12-hour-25-minute dial and good intentions, which is why it drifts out of sync as the season goes on; this pulls the measured height every ten minutes, shows a rising or falling arrow, and counts down to the next high and low with their predicted heights. There is no dial to set by hand: you pick your NOAA station once at setup, and it remembers your station and WiFi through power outages.

Tide Station watches whichever of the 200+ NOAA stations across the US and its territories you pick at setup: the harbor, the pier, or the bay by the beach house. It remembers that station and your WiFi through power outages, which beach houses provide free of charge. Not every station reports weather; at one that doesn’t, you get the tides without the conditions.

A tide station is a water-level gauge at one fixed spot, such as a harbor, a pier, a bay or a tidal river. NOAA runs a network of them and publishes the readings. Tide Station, the clock I build, shows live readings from any of more than 200 of them across the US and its territories, and you choose yours at setup.

Yes, as current conditions. Tide Station shows what your NOAA station is measuring right now beside the tide: air and water temperature, wind and gusts, and pressure. Not every station reports weather, and at one that does not you get the tides without the conditions. It shows no weather forecast; Storm Sentinel is the one that shows forecasts, alerts and radar, for a ZIP code in the lower 48 states. Besides the tide predictions, Tide Station also looks ahead to the moon: its Moon screen gives tonight’s phase and the dates of the next spring or neap tides.

PlankLabs gadgets join a 2.4 GHz WiFi network. They don’t speak 5 GHz-only WiFi. That is the radio in the silicon rather than a software choice, and it comes with a consolation prize: 2.4 GHz travels farther and through walls better than 5 GHz, which suits a gadget that lives wherever it looks best rather than next to the router.

I make every reasonable effort to keep your PlankLabs gadget working, and updates arrive over the air on their own, but nobody can guarantee that an outside data feed will exist forever, and most gadgets depend on one. The hardware is always yours, and the data is for delight and general awareness, never for navigation, emergencies or safety-critical decisions.