WX report containing rainfall

[Andrew Elwell]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to DIY my own parser to take weather from my home assistant
instance to APRS. My weather station (Ecowitt WS90, slurped in via
rtl_433) spits out absolute rainfall values since last reset.
The APRS spec (1.2b) is a bit vague on what the '# = raw rain counter'
should be. - I wasn't going to bother sending the r/p/P values, and
just send #.
I'm guessing (because everything else is in US units) it should be
converted from mm to in/100, but has anyone got an example of max
digits this can be? or if a decimal point is acceptable?

yes, I know weewx would do this for me, but where's the headache in that :-)

Ta
Andrew

[Nosey Nick VA3NNW]

Ham::APRS::FAP perl module (and thus probably aprs.fi itself) seems to expect WX "#" to be followed by any number of digits, but no decimal point... BUT it then ignores it, and doesn't even store it for any further graphing / output / etc:

        if ($s =~ s/#(\d+)//) {

                # raw rain counter

        }

My own parser assumes 3 digits, but now I'm re-reading APRS101, I'm not sure why I made that assumption - may be that 100% of "#" examples on APRS-IS were 3 digits at the time?

I have no idea how well other parsers handle "#"... Which is why I went to the effort of doing the "Rain since midnight" thing on my own weather station. Then your only problem is how you define "midnight"   :-/

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2025, Andrew Elwell wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I'm trying to DIY my own parser to take weather from my home assistant
> instance to APRS.

Hi,

Please remember that this is the aprs.fi group, not a generic APRS group.

Please post general APRS questions to the APRSSIG, or the groups.io APRS
group. Thanks!

- Hessu