Dashboard options for multiple sensor system: MQTT, other?

[Sunray]

Hello!

Sorry if this topic has already been addressed, but googling gave only partial help. I've now managed to set up WeeWX on two Raspberries to record my Vantage Vue weather station feeds, one remote with 2.6 sec intervals and the second local with 1 minutes interval. I'm now deliberating the dashboard options. I'd like to have the following features:

• a publicly accessible webpage (or site) displaying the weather data, including the fast 2.6-sec interval data in near real time.
• Graphs of the various weather parameters, preferably with some interactive features such as day/week/month, pan- and-zoom (to drill into past weather events).
• In the future, add one or two additional station feeds, also with near real time capability.

 

So far, thanks to the good strategy notes on the WeeWX wiki, I've identified three basic options for this "dashboard engine":

1. This option would use the built in database features of WeeWX and open a port on my local RPI which runs a web server on my local LAN. Likely challenges are combining the data of several station feeds, and handling IP addressing and security (no previous experience of dynamic DNS setup)? 
2.  use a dashboard service such as Meteotemplate to host the dashboard. Likely challenges are combining feeds from several stations, as well as the near real time display? 
3.  build a system where both RPIs act as MQTT clients, feeding data to an MQTT broker residing e.g. on one of the RPIs. Then build a dashboard MQTT client/webserver subscribing to the broker's data. Likely challenges are the steepness of the learning curve, combined display of real time and archived data, and I've so far not found a complete tutorial-style description to use as template and perhaps save some work hours.

 

For option 3, I already happen to have a webhotel subscription which includes domain name, PHP capability and (just one) MySQL database, but no experience yet in building my own webserver, let alone  MQTT-connected.

So your advice about the feasibility and possible pitfalls of these (or other) options is highly appreciated! Also if I'm completely off track, please let me know. Thanks in advance!

[vince]

I'm not aware of an end-to-end tutorial for what you're asking.

Given your stated caveats about no experience of building a webserver, nor connecting to MQTT, this one might be too much of a lift for your expertise level.  There are also lots of security things to think about.   Don't open your LAN to Internet traffic please.  Too much risk there almost certainly.

At a minimum look at the weewx Wiki for more reading.   There are some pages there for possible options for getting data into weewx and how to do consolidating multiple sources of information.

But you could build it up incrementally LAN-only and see whether your requirements are 'nice to have' or 'need to have' and whether you want to spend that much labor on it or not.

• you can get realtime updates via a weewx-generated website if you install the Belchertown skin and configure the MQTT+websockets features in Belchertown.  There are a huge number of threads here in weewx-users for how to do that.  That would at least get you started.  Very easy to get going LAN-only

• if you want to combine multiple sources of data into one web, that makes things harder by far, depending on which sources of data you want to aggregate.  You'd need to either use some extension or possibly even write your own.   Many people tend toward MQTT for this.   Ingesting multiple sources of data into weewx is in one of the wiki pages mentioned above.

Once you get it all working LAN-only, you'd then need to get your data onto your Internet site.  Just rsync it via weewx.  That part is easy.

If you need the Internet-facing site to have the realtime updates, you'd also need to do a MQTT setup on your Internet site, and do 'that' securely.   There are folks here who've done that, but it does increase the attack surface on your Internet site as you'd now need to do the web 'and' MQTT securely.

Regardless, you're going to need to devote some time+effort to build something like this up, unless there's some non-weewx hardware device that can do all that magic.