Is there any way to build a homemade solar sensor?

There are various options explained in this forum. One is to put a temperature sensor in a jar and tell this to WD. It will then plot it as solar. Other option I use is a 1-wire humidity sensor board but I have a photodiode instead of a humidity sensor itself. It works great apart from nonlinearity in the morning and hourly little jumps (probably due to some recalculations done in software). Overall it works nice.