Nooby question.

[Ian Rattew]

Hi all, I have come from the world of meteohub on a raspberry pi which I have run for over a decade. I have a now old Davis VP2 and the wind vane is playing up yet again so I thought I would investigate what is current in Weather-stations and Software. I have always run a WordPress weather station website that I would like to maintain but I am now looking for something that also has Home Assistant integration.

So I found Weewx. I have it fully installed with Home Assistant integration and some Skins. WordPress integration seems doable.

I can see that it is very good regarding live data reporting but I am confused how to do aggregate and historic values such max and min temperature in the last hour or average soil temp today.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Ian

[weather list]

Just for the record, you can get parts for the Davis wind vanes such as ball bearings, etc.

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[Tom Keffer]

Did you look through the Customization Guide? It has answers to your questions. For example,

Max temperature last hour: $hour.currentTemp.max

Min temperature last hour: $hour.currentTemp.min

Today's average soil temperature: $day.soilTemp1.avg

and so on.

-tk

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[Ian Rattew]

Hi Tom,

thanks for the feedback. Always a good idea to read the manual! 

I have done a lot of reading and it is all rather daunting at first! I have been accustomed to building my website pages from individual data records that would equate to the values that I see in Home Assistant, the MQTT weather/Loops data. I guess I am looking for the archive records that are stored in the SQL database.  The approach seems to be the creation of reports that include those values. Is there an easy to directly get the those values? 

I searched for $hour. and $day. but didn't find any specific references. How do I know what values are available? 

On a separate note I am considering getting an Ecowitt WS90 with a GW2000 or GW3000 gateway. Reading the wiki I became aware that there are three drivers, ecowittcustom, ecowitt_http and GW1000 - how do determine which would be the best?

Thanks, Ian

[Vince Skahan]

The docs can be pretty daunting for sure.  There's not really a gentle introduction that I can find for what you're asking.  Things jump into the gory details.

Anyway - you get things by specifying the time or aggregation period ($day, $week, etc.) and the database element (outTemp, inTemp, etc.) and what aggregation type you want (min, max, etc.) which gets you to a cheetah template item of $day.outTemp.max or the like.

• https://www.weewx.com/docs/5.3/custom/cheetah-generator/#tags has the time/aggregation periods
• https://www.weewx.com/docs/5.3/reference/aggtypes/  has the aggregation types
  

And what's in your db of course depends on your station.  In general you can just look at the schema for what elements are defined there.

There are time periods $latest and $current that come in handy in addition to $day, $hour, $week which come in handy as well.

Re: the ecowitt question it's a long answer that really depends on your hardware and how new it is.  The old original gw1000 driver would work a WS90 and either GW2000 or GW3000 but you probably will want to buy their tipping rain sensor if you want accurate rain.  I used to have the 'high' version of that and it was pretty solid.  My WS85 was junk with respect to haptic rain accuracy.  Your mileage may vary.

Since you have MQTT set up already for Home Assistant you could set your gateway to emit MQTT to your broker and then use the MQTTSubscribe extension as a driver to get it into weewx as one option, but the original gw1000 driver should be pretty much plug+play if you're just thinking of picking up a WS90 and either gateway and doing it simpler.

The other ecowitt drivers have their own pros and cons depending on whether you want to handle data catchup from SD storage on your gateway (GW3000) or not.  There are so many threads here about ecowitt that I can't even hazard a guess with which one to suggest given ecowitt coming out with new hardware about every week it seems.  FWIW, my opinion is MQTT is the only really supportable long-term option if you want new ecowitt sensors, but anything that's been around a while will work fine with the old original GW1000 sensor.

(I have ecowitt inside/outside T+H, soil temp, soil moisture sensors here and a GW1200 screenless gateway currently)

[John Smith]

You can use the MQTT Publish extension to send archive data too, eg

    [[topics]]
        [[[loop]]]
            binding = loop
            [[[[fields]]]]
                [[[[[dateTime]]]]]
                    ignore = false
                    append_unit_label = false
                    conversion_type = integer
        [[[archive]]]
            binding = archive
            [[[[fields]]]]
                [[[[[dateTime]]]]]
                    ignore = false
                    append_unit_label = false
                    conversion_type = integer

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[Peter Fletcher]

There was a fairly good WordPress Weather Station plugin, using Cumulus realtime.txt format data (which weewx can produce, using an appropriate addon). Unfortunately, its developers stopped supporting it a few years ago, and it stopped working altogether (it loaded but wouldn't display updates) a couple of WordPress updates ago. I was not able to find a 'commercial' replacement plugin, so I wrote a very simple one, which I use on a HOA website I support.

[Ian Rattew]

thanks, I have use the standard MQTT so is  weewx-mqtt-publish a replacement for that?

[Peter Fletcher]

I don't use MQTT, but I believe that you are correct - I know that many weewx users do use MQTT.

[John Smith]

No idea, I've only been playing with MQTT for a few weeks, because I got a relative ZigBee sensors for their garden which led me to setting up zigbee2mqtt and in the last couple of days, I re-coded large parts of my weather site that was updating every 5 minutes from a text file generated by weeWX every 5 minutes to displaying loop and archive data.

Then a satellite image of Australia that gets updated hourly, now gets sent via MQTT as well and since those messages are retained in MQTT the last message posted is then loaded.

We lost internet for about 4 days a month or 2 back due to the internet provider using uncommon plugs on their power supplies and it just happened to blow up and we can't keep spares of them. Due to previous prolonged outages I got an OpenWRT router and it can get internet by connecting to my phone in hotspot mode and I have a Cloudflare tunnel setup in the router and during the whole outage everything kept working as if nothing had changed because Cloudflare tunnels work even behind mobile phone company CGNAT.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/weewx-user/e403e8cf-f4c6-4148-87bc-cb77b5b253e4n%40googlegroups.com.

[Vince Skahan]

Ian: can you restate your current questions please ? 

MQTT Subscribing

• https://github.com/weewx-contrib/mqttsubscribe - Rich's extension works as a driver 'or' as a service (to add to another driver's info)
  

MQTT Publishing

• https://github.com/matthewwall/weewx-mqtt - Matthew's original extension, stable for 4+ years now
  
• https://github.com/weewx-contrib/mqttpublish - Rich's much more actively maintained variant

All work fine.

[Ian Rattew]

Hi Peter,

I would be very interested to learn about your wordpress plug-in - is it in the plug-in library?

thanks,

Ian

[Peter Fletcher]

You can see it on our HOA website. There are two variants - the simpler one can be seen toward the bottom of the index page, and a slightly more decorative one can be seen on the site's Weather page. While it behaves like (and is) a standard WordPress plugin, I did not want to spend the time needed to write the necessary installation code to make it available via the plugin library, so it has to be 'manually' installed. I have the extension that generates a Cumulus realtime.txt file installed in weewx, and a report section in weewx that FTPs it to the root of the site.

[Ian Rattew]

To conclude the thread, I installed  https://github.com/weewx-contrib/mqttpublish and now have loop/archive/records feeding into MQTT for my Home assistant requirements.  

For the website feed I installed  weewx-crt which generates the json reports and I wrote a wordpress php plugin to parse the json queried by short-code keyword to provide tables by period (day/week/month/year) or a specific values.

Now focusing on the hardware again. I'll see if I can breathe life back in to the Davis VP1 Anemometer. 

Thanks for all the advice.