Update of rain data to wunderground

[kar ss]

Hi All,

I recently installed Weewx 3.9.1 on Raspberry Pi 4 (running Raspbian Buster), to connect my Acurite weather station (via the display console) and upload data to weather underground. Installation was smooth and the weather data gets uploaded to weather underground. I have enabled rapid fire so that the data gets transmitted to wunderground in real time. I find that the rain data gets updated only every 5 minutes, is there a way to change the frequency to 30 secs or 1 minute. I am new to weewx and raspbian, any help to get the rain data updated rapidly to wunderground will be appreciated.

Thanks

[Andrew Milner]

rapid fire display is in the hands of WU.  If the station provides the data then weewx will upload it.  However not all stations provide all data in every loop packet - and this could be what you are seeing.

[gjr80]

Hi,

Running WU RF with a station such as an Acurite (that provides partial loop packets) can result in some unusual results. When RF is enabled WeeWX will report whatever it can from the data available in the loop packets received from your station. You could try running WeeWX directly (http://weewx.com/docs/usersguide.htm#Running_directly), this will show you the loop packets (lines starting with LOOP:) and archive records (lines starting with REC:). WeeWX can only report what is in those packets/records. So if field rain only appears every so many minutes or every archive record then that is as often as it can be reported.

Gary

[kar ss]

Thanks Andrew.

[kar ss]

Hi gjr80,

Thanks for the reply. I tried your suggestion, I stopped the weewx running in deamon mode using the command: sudo /etc/init.d/weewx stop

and tried to run it directly as suggested by you using the command line: sudo weewxd weewx.conf, but I am getting the following error message:  OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/pi/weewx.conf

screen shot is shown below, any suggestions?

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo weewxd weewx.conf

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/usr/bin/weewxd", line 64, in <module>

    weewx.engine.main(options, args)

  File "/usr/share/weewx/weewx/engine.py", line 852, in main

    sane = os.stat(config_path).st_ctime

OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/pi/weewx.conf'

[gjr80]

You will need to provide the path to weewx.conf, try something like:

$ sudo weewxd /etc/weewx/weewx.conf

Gary

[kar ss]

Hi Gary,

The modified command pointing to the weewx.conf file works, I could now see information about the loop packets that is being received. The partial loop packets send rain total every 36 seconds and rain rate every 18 seconds.

I will run this command for a while to see the actual update to wunderground during a rain event. In the meantime, is there a way to automatically restart the command in the event of the reboot of the raspberry pi?

For your info, I am posting the screen shot of the RPi terminal screen running weewx directly from the command line,

Thanks

ss

[gjr80]

Ok, so you should be seeing rain info posted to WU more frequently than once every 5 minutes. If you edit weewx.conf and set debug = 2 then restart WeeWX you will see in the log the data that is being posted to WU. It should appear every 18 or 36 odd seconds. Is rain data being posted? Can you copy a portion of the log and post it here?

It is quite possible that WeeWX is posting the data but WU is somehow ignoring/losing/butchering it.

Gary

[kar ss]

Thanks Gary, I can check the rain data only during the next rain event. I am attaching the syslog file as a text document. Hope this helps you get some additional insight into the issue.

SS

[kar ss]

Hi Gray,

I tried to run Weewx directly during a rain event and this also did not help, the rain data gets updated to wunderground only at 5 minutes interval. But I made one observation, both the weewx seasons report and the the rain data in wunderground gets updated exactly at the same time. Not sure whether there is any link to this. May be someone can throw some light.

Thanks

SS

[gjr80]

The point of running Weewx directly was to see the loop and archive data that Weewx is processing and you can then reconcile this against what is appearing on WU. If you set debug=2 you will see the data posted to WU on the log. This was never going to fix anything, rathet if will provoke a complete picture of what data is being received/processed by WeeWX and posted to WU.

Suggest you set debug=2 if not already done, restart WeeWX and post a log extract covering a good 2 to 3 archive intervals. A sanitised copy of weewx.conf would help too. You can use wee_debug for this just check the output before posting.

Gary

[kar ss]

Thanks Gary, please find attached the syslog file and wee_debug file in txt format. Hope this helps. SS

[gjr80]

Ok, so we can see that WeeWX is indeed sending RF updates to WU many times each archive period. What we can’t see is any non-zero rain values being sent (assume this is because it was not raining during the log extract - if it was raining we have a more fundamental data issue). What you should do now investigate what happens when it does rain; there are two checks you can do here. Firstly you can do a gross error check just by looking at the RF entries for dailyrainin and rainin in the log; are they non-zero? are they sensible, do they seem to agree with the console? You can also do a more involved detailed analysis, this time run WeeWX directly while it is raining. Capture the console output for an archive period or two and then go back and look at the log entries for the corresponding period. If rainin and dailyrainin agrees with the loop rain data then the issue is WU. If rainin or dailyrainin does not agree with the loop data then there is a WeeWX/station issue.

Gary

[kar ss]

Hi Gary, you are right, there was no rain event during the log period (reason for zero rain values), I did check the log during an earlier rain event and indeed weewx was able to log the rain event as well as the rain rate. With respect to the data being sent by weewx to WU, I don't see any discrepancy in the data, console data matches with the WU data for rain total, just that the data gets updated every 5 minutes in WU instead of the expected RF updates, while WU temp, wind, wind direction all follow RF updates, only rain total and rain rate are reported every 5 minutes. So based on your inputs, I have to conclude that the issue is with WU. Yesterday I turned of the RF update by modifying the weewx.conf file (changed RF value from true to false), just to see how the WU data looks and found an interesting observation, when RF was turned ON WU did not report any wind gust, but after turning OFF RF updates, WU is reporting wind gust. This is a bit strange to me. Seems WU still has some issues with respect to the way the data is reported based on incoming data from weewx. SS

[Andrew Milner]

logically that makes sense - a windgust 'should' be a wind speed sustained I think for 2-3 seconds  in pure metereological terms.  With RF it is not possible to have a windgust if uploading data every few seconds.  WU probably, rightly, ignore windgust values in RF uploads but will accept it in 5 minute archive periods.  I would imagine WU try and minimise the amount of data updated on RF uploads and probably update most values only on archive intervals.  To me this makes sense and is logically correct, since most metereoligical values except fow windspeed and winddirection do not really change that quickly.

[kar ss]

Thanks Andrew, your explanation of the wind gust is agreeable to me. But WU updates rain data at more frequent intervals for other stations in my neighborhood, also when I connect the Acurite console to WU through PC-Connect the rain data is displayed using RF. So I think WU treats my RF rain total values sent from weewx differently or has some issues. May be someone using weewx and an acurite console to communicate to WU could throw some light on how their WU rain total gets displayed. SS 

[Andrew Milner]

tbh it is not worth the effort!!  imho WU should stop trying to cater for rf and just sort out handling archive records correctly and consistently.  RF is largely pointless.  How often do you look at the weather vane for 2 seconds and say that is the wind direction - you don't - i would put money on it that you watch it for 30 seconds or so to determine a dominant direction!!!  so it would make more sense to up load every 30 seconds and give the average speed and direction during the 30 seconds - or just go further and use the weewx archive interval then everyone is happy!!!!!

best of luck in your battles with WU.

[gjr80]

Interesting. I just spent 10 minutes watching a Davis VP2 on WU using RF displaying and updating wind gust data. It also happened to be raining and rainfall data was updating albeit at a slower rate (as expected given a Davis does not update rainfall data as frequently as wind). The station uses WeeWX though I couldn’t correlate it with a website via the WeeWX map.

In any case I am not sure that RF is as broken as it is made out to be. I would be interested in seeing the log showing half a dozen or so archive periods log of RF data being uploaded whilst it was raining. I still have a lingering doubt in my mind that partial packet stations (even with caching) are doing something different that causes issues with RF.

Gary