Dead usb after Orangepi zero fried itself poss with the help of a spider

[Chris Bruce]

Hi everyone.

Its been a while since I have been about due to family matters and a house move.

I got back to my old property to get a few things that were in stoarge and I grabbed the weather station from its mount on the shed roof and noticed it was still transmittings data, it was showing low battery on the sender. Nothing new as it has not had any batterys in for about 2 years.

I looked at the opi and no signs of light or even life so just removed it from the wall.

Now today at the new house I was looking at the opi and deciced to power it up before I go out and fit the sensors outside but to my horror there was indeed no signs of life. I plugged the display into the pc and . No de dunk of new hardware found. . I opened the opi case and there was the remenants of a large spider leg covering the 3v and 5v regulators and they at some point let out the magic some of the electronic genie. All I can think it a wet spider made its way inside the opi case to warm up and make a new home and it shorted the 5v regulator that then took the usb out on the display and the 3v reg at the same time.

In the huff but still having working sensors and display I though It could just sit on the window showing the weather from outside and that would be it untill I could afford to replace it (if I can find a compatable one)

5 mins ago while hunting through youtube for Home Asistant weather station info, I found a video that shows what looks like the good old maplin sensors so I had a watch of the video, Low and Behold I sure does look very simmilar. Rj11 plugs, the anenometer plugs into the vane or vise versa, the rain catch is a seesaw counter etc etc and they connect of a little IOT board. A far as I can see the board is powered from 2 x AA cells an has a rpi zero w on the back to do the computing, it has a light sensor and a bme pressure sensor. rj11 for the rain and rj11 for the anenomter and direction.

The company is Pimoroni and they offfer a full kit with mounting pole, sensors and board for £130 and just the board ( Enviro Weather ) for £30

Jim could the data (i think is sent by mqtt) be incorporated into pywws or would it take a full rewrite.

I have a pi3 running Home Assistant and one of its uses is to host an mqtt server (to talk to home lights and secuirity devices etc)

I will order the board this week comming as I know I should be able to set it up in Home assistant so nothing is lost if pywws can not process the data. It may have its uses if anyone has a failing sender that are now like hens teeth to find and buy or has a display that has a dead usb like me.

[Jim Easterbrook]

On 23/11/2023 18:55, Chris Bruce wrote:

> 5 mins ago while hunting through youtube for Home Asistant weather
> station info, I found a video that shows what looks like the good old
> maplin sensors so I had a watch of the video, Low and Behold I sure does
> look very simmilar. Rj11 plugs, the anenometer plugs into the vane or
> vise versa, the rain catch is a seesaw counter etc etc and they connect
> of a little IOT board. A far as I can see the board is powered from 2 x
> AA cells an has a rpi zero w on the back to do the computing, it has a
> light sensor and a bme pressure sensor. rj11 for the rain and rj11 for
> the anenomter and direction.
>
> The company is Pimoroni and they offfer a full kit with mounting pole,
> sensors and board for £130 and just the board ( Enviro Weather ) for £30
>
> Jim could the data (i think is sent by mqtt) be incorporated into pywws
> or would it take a full rewrite.

I wouldn't try to modify pywws any further. It's already a bit of a mess
and a lot of it is about sorting out the data format and foibles of the
old base station.

If you've got something that sends data to mqtt then I suspect your best
bet is to take data from mqtt and process it to do the graphs and
uploads like pywws can do. Then you've separated data production from
data consumption, which seems like a good thing.

You might still benefit from seeing how pywws does uploads and so on
before writing new software in modern Python.

--
Jim Easterbrook <http://www.jim-easterbrook.me.uk/>

[Mark Jarvis]

I also found the same kit and have it on my Christmas list so hope to be playing with it in the new year. Then I can retire my Maplin weather station after 13 years of service before it just dies! Parts of it will live on though since the rain and wind bits appear compatible.

With my future Pimoroni kit, I was planning to write some kind of python script which would subscribe to the MQTT topic and store the data in my original pywws data store. I wanted to do this so all other pywws functionality "downstream" would keep working... in theory. Then pywws can also live on!

In practice, I'm not sure how well this will work since the live-logging daemon would never see a real USB device - so will it still schedule service uploaders in this situation? And how would it "know" that new data has arrived if some rogue external script just shoves data into the store? It certainly wouldn't look like an all-in-one solution as pywws generally is (i.e. data collection, storage and upload). However, if I can get the fundamental MQTT-to-data-store bit working and keep my other service bits working, I think that would be a good start!

[Chris Bruce]

I thought that Jim. I think I remember a post a few years ago about someone trying to add a light sensor to the data and it was going to be quite a bit of work that had to be done by adding the bytes to the recorded data and reprocessing it etc and it was just going to be too much going on with the posibility of corrupting data etc.

  I have found a replacement display that is supposed to be compatable and looks the same but in silver instead of black but the pricetag of £90 + delivery is not really worth the outlay.

Mark. I just recieved my Enviro weather and its not all its made out to be unfortunatly, a bit of creative marketing and lacking support with poor documentation leaves me feeling a touch cheated.

The board is supposed to arrive ready to setup and go, but my board and a few others seem to have been sent blank and the board needs to flashed with the latest firmware to actually get the wifi to show up and let you access the initial configuration of the device but and the instructions are far from correct. Youtube seems to be the answer to get it into firmware update mode and links to the git then it can be used.

The git maintainer seems to be in no hurry to merge any of the user created fixes tho.

I plan to use Home Assistant on a rasp pi 4 to get the mqtt data from the enviro but it does not have auto mqtt discovery so untill the maintainer pulls the mqtt auto fix in its got to be done manually.

On a down side the enviro chews battery power during wifi data send and a few users have complained that 2 brand new AA batterys can be dead in less than 48 hours. ( no where near 6 months as advertised ) this forces them to power over usb (so its not viable to run long usb cables to the station) it also can cause usb lockups and other problems when powering on usb. those users now supply 5v from a mains power source to the battery connector and they think its now stable.

now the bad part (if the battery usage and usb lockups were not bad enough) the station will log its data as part of the course but when it sends its data all of the readings are the same timestamp even tho they do include the individual reading timestamp the software seems to want to use the time of send timestamp. I do not have it setup completely yet but there may be a way round it using influxdb to take the transmitted data and then split into json data and then use the correct time stamps to fix the way the enviro works and actually make it usable.

I hope I have not put you off the enviro Mark but their idea and hardware looks the part its just let down by software and support at the moment

I have a link to a youtube video that has used it and does not actually recomend it if you want to watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snCp0TqrER4&ab_channel=TechteamGB

[Mark Jarvis]

Thanks Chris, you just ruined my Christmas!! Joking - just sounds like there is more tinkering involved but tinkering is another motivation for getting that kit instead of something more polished. Maybe I need to add some rechargeable batteries and a small solar panel to the Christmas list though as I kinda wanted data on a 5 minute timescale to be on par with pywws. I'm getting the indoor kit too but that should be easier to plug in permanently. I imagine the most power efficient way to transmit the data would probably be using Bluetooth LE with some dedicated software on a "basestation" (such as a RasPi?) to capture the data, but I'm not sure I'm ready to take on that challenge quite yet! That becomes closer to being the pywws architecture though.

Fortunately I already have a PicoW which I've played with so I have already felt the pain of flashing firmware and interacting with it (or not) over USB. I have pywws publishing to my MQTT Broker with Home Assistant subscribed to it (across 3 different RasPi's at one point) which was entirely set up manually since pywws doesn't do the auto-discovery magic but that means I have an existing manual config to build on. (That said, someone appears to have submitted an auto-discovery enhancement pull request to the pimoroni/enviro git repo). It's a shame HA doesn't decode the timestamps properly - that seems a rather fundamental issue which I hope can be resolved. However my idea of writing a script to subscribe to the MQTT data and store it in the pywws data store could be written to deal with the timestamps properly. In theory, maybe it could shove the data directly into HA's database too - but this is starting to sound more and more hacky.

None of this was ever going to give a "drop in replacement" for the original Watson hardware and bits of pywws would always just end up being used and abused while losing the "end-to-end" solution we all got used to it being, so I think this endeavor is certainly not for everyone!

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[Chris Bruce]

Mark if you already have HA then I am sure you will manage to define the mqtt and set it up a lot easier than I did.  have only just started my HA journey and its quite a steep learning & forgetting curve.

I have it working on the bench right now and HA looks not to bad.

 because you can define where data goes you should be able to sort the configuration to your devices as you wish. I think there is someone asking about setting Weather Underground up in the git and if you know python etc what you need to do sounds reasonable.

[Chris Bruce]

@ Mark Jarvis  not to be defeated by the dead usb port and the flakey enviro (that has locked up twice now with just a red light showing requiring a press of the reset button) I have revisited one of the old alternate ways to get the data from the transmitter and things have come along way in a couple of years, No more trying to decode ook etc or whatever protocol was used or changed to .

I went searching and found a link to rflink gateway ( https://www.rflink.nl/index.php ) and decided to have a tinker about while the 3d printer is making an arm to mount my spare sensors to so I can test the enviro outside in real conditions.

I just dug out an old 433mhz reciever board, 3 jumper wires and an arduino mega that was lying about doing nothing and as they say, bish bosh bang I have the  rflink gateway reading the sensor data that is live streaming into the mega .

a snip from the data.

20;00;Nodo RadioFrequencyLink - RFLink Gateway V1.1 - R48;
10;version;
20;01;VER=1.1;REV=48;BUILD=04;
10;status;
20;02;STATUS;setRF433=ON;setNodoNRF=OFF;setMilight=OFF;setLivingColors=OFF;setAnsluta=OFF;setGPIO=OFF;setBLE=OFF;setMysensors=OFF;
20;03;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0004;HUM=82;WINSP=0000;WINGS=0000;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0003;BAT=OK;
20;04;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0004;HUM=82;WINSP=0000;WINGS=000c;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0014;BAT=OK;
20;05;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0004;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=0025;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0014;BAT=OK;
20;06;Drayton;ID=0a20;SWITCH=07;CMD=OFF;
20;07;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=000c;WINGS=0018;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0014;BAT=OK;
20;08;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=0018;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0014;BAT=OK;
20;09;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=0025;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0001;BAT=OK;
20;0A;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=000c;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0014;BAT=OK;
20;0B;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0025;WINGS=003d;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0015;BAT=OK;
20;0C;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=000c;WINGS=0031;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0014;BAT=OK;
20;0D;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=000c;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0014;BAT=OK;
20;0E;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=0025;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0010;BAT=OK;
20;0F;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=0025;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0000;BAT=OK;
20;10;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=000c;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0014;BAT=OK;
20;11;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=0018;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0014;BAT=OK;
20;12;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=000c;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0002;BAT=OK;
20;13;DKW2012;ID=0046;TEMP=0008;HUM=83;WINSP=0000;WINGS=000c;RAIN=2c1f;WINDIR=0000;BAT=OK;

No idea if this of any use or could be saved to a db and converted to json for pywws.

[Mark Jarvis]

You've essentially replaced the baseunit's functionality as a receiver. Nicely done. To me, that would be the hard bit! It's been a long time since I've played with arduinos and programming them in C!

I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to figure out what the hex translates to in terms of temperature numbers and wind directions etc. and manipulate it into pywws's data store or publish it to MQTT etc.

Also, with HA, just note that the log's and charts don't last long! it's not really built for long term data storage, more like "recent events" and it will delete the old stuff as new stuff comes in.

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[Chris Bruce]

Life got even simpler once I found a ready to use device called a "LoRa32" that has 433mhz reciever in a stand alone unit. It has been designed for watching the 433mhz signals and someone else has written software that takes the data direct from the fine offset transmitter and converts it into an mqtt that can be sent to a mqtt broker for use wherever you can, im my case direct to my HA mqtt broker and into a weather page on the dashboard.

This page grab is from the Pimironi Enviro that I have been testing but the exact same settings can be used from the LoRa32 albeit minus the luminance data as it is not included from my old maplin station..  On a plus side I still get to use the old display in another room .. The old Maplin lives to read another day.