Reverse Engineering the Weather STAR 4000

If you lived in the USA in the '90s, there’s a good chance you tuned in to the Weather Channel to check conditions for the day. Although we take the ability to check the forecast via the Internet instantly using a phone or computer, the intermittent automated weather display was – whether you considered it or not – really an amazing concept at the time. These automated real-time displays were powered by “WeatherStar 4000” units, which translated a satellite feed into graphics that could be seen on the “8s.”

These units were in-use until 2014, when the required analog satellite feed was retired. While this transition was largely unnoticed, and/or forgotten today, the Weather STAR 4000 hardware is quite an interesting piece of retro-computing. After keeping an eye out for one of these rare devices, hacker techknight finally was able to obtain one off of eBay in 2018. Unfortunately, the software to run the device was normally downloaded via satellite, and has to be reloaded after a power outage. Because of this, code needed to run it appears to be lost to time.

Undeterred, techknight went to work reverse engineering the Weather STAR 4000 from the ground up. With the help of a few fellow enthusiasts, and even an original graphic designer of the system, techknight embarked on a truly epic reverse-engineering project to get it working again.

The scale of this technological archeology project is broad in scope, and involved physically probing the boards to figure out connections, and analyzing their various chips. This analysis even involved writing custom code for an Arduino Nano to dump the PAL chips… and actually learning the C programming language in the process.

Though the build documentation is still a work-in-progress, the resulting footage from the reborn unit is shown in the video below. What's laid out so far is quite the journey, and worth a look for anyone interested in weather and retro-computing!