Weewx and Well Watch 760

[Oscar Barlow]

I am about to purchase an Eno Scientific Well Watch 760. It has an RS232 and USB interface and I thought about using weewx to collect that data, store it in a data base and produce charts. I would have a pi 3 mounted in existing metal electrical cabinet by the well head. It would be connected to the device and use WiFi to connect to network.

There isn’t a lot of data to store. Time stamp and water level. The unit’s current settings could be stored with the record. The big issue I see is that the log interval could change. I may want to log every minute from 7AM to 10PM and once an hour during off hours.

A couple of questions.

1. Am I nuts? Yes is an acceptable answer. I may be trying to plow a field with a sports car.

2. I’d need to write a driver and a service. Anything else?

3. Suggestions or a different another approach?

Sill in the design phase. Waiting to confirm with my well guy he can install the 760 and electrical for my pi.

Thanks,

Oscar

[Andy]

Just add a field in the database and adapt this persons code to put your well reading in the db

https://gitlab.com/wjcarpenter/bme280wx/-/blob/master/bin/user/bme280wx.py

[Oscar Barlow]

A simpler approach.  Thanks!

[michael.k...@gmx.at]

I would suggest to use something more lightweight than a RaspberryPi, something like an ESP8266, if it is just for collecting the data and transfer it to a place you can handle it.

[Oscar Barlow]

Good idea.  I'm not familar with the ESP8266.  I'll check it out.

[ral...@gmail.com]

I have used the ESP8266 boards and found that they work, however they can be a pain when they stop working (for unknown reasons - wifi burps or power problems) and you have to power cycle them. I ran the ESP8266 code in my workshop for over two month with no problems, then I put them out in the wild and they failed randomly. I use MQTT to communicate with the RPi running WeeWx and a MQTT broker. I have two ESP8266 talking to a RPi at my vacation home and they both will randomly stop working, when I get to them and power them off and on they work again for awhile (maybe weeks). They don't log problems so I am guessing about the problems. I have an RPi in my workshop basically doing the same function (reading a DS18B20 sensor) and find that having a log and using systemctl to restart on any failure is providing me with a more reliable solution and the cost difference very small.  I plan to replace both ESP8266 with RPi's soon. The RPi can easily do much more than read the temp sensors and I am adding a USB camera to one of them, it will FTP an image to the same host as my WeeWx sites.  The problems with ESP8266 could be my code is not robust enough for problems - again with no logs its a guess. YMMV

[michael.k...@gmx.at]

I found them reliable except for deep-sleeping below freezing temperatures. But this problem can be solved if you attach an external timer. 

[ral...@gmail.com]

I considered an external timer as a solution for the ESP8266, but decided to use one of the "old" RPi 3 that were sitting on the workbench.  

Is the Eno Scientific Well Watch 760 correct or did you mean 670? Very interesting devices.

[Oscar Barlow]

I meant the 670.   I've got a pi3 I'm going to use. 

[Oscar Barlow]

First my thanks to Tom Keffer, Matthew Wall, Pat O'brien and stackoverflow for their code and examples.

The wellwatch 670 and raspberry pi will be running on Solar power.  A daemon (wellwatch) on the pi will read data from the 670 and update a mariaDB database on a server in the house.  This is a standalone system and is not connected to the existing weather process.  I created a wview_small schema and added my columns to the archive table.

The daemon updates the following into the archive table.  Default values are used for the weather columns.  Probably don't all the wind columns and archive_day tables below, but this works.
   dateTime   # wellwatch dateTime
   interval   # wellwatch interval
   unit       # default to 1
   outTemp
   rainMeeting with the well company this morning
   rainRate
   windDir
   windGust
   windGustDir
   windSpeed
             # wellwatch columns are updated.

the following archive_day tables are created with default values.  No archive_day tables were created for the well data.

archive_day_outTemp
archive_day_rxCheckPercent
archive_day_wind
archive_day_windDir
archive_day_windGust
archive_day_windGustDir
archive_day_windSpeed

For the Belchertown skin, Copied the Belchertown/json/weewx_data.json.tmpl to wellwatch_data.json.tmpl, removed all the weather specific information and added the appropriate wellwatch columns.  Modified skin.conf to use the wellwatch_data.json.tmpl file.  Created a cusom index.html.tmpl with only well data.

Using test data, the wellwatch daemon updates the database on the server.  The server runs wee_reports and creates the well watch web page

[Oscar Barlow]

Forgot to add....  the lastUpdate row in archive_day__metadata is created/updated.