Saratoga and Weewx-WD - Any HowTo or guide that explains installation and Setup ?????

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Hello People,

I am sorry for the double post but I wanted to change topic subject but I couldn't find how. Please delete the old one.

I have tried a lot but missing Python knowledge I can't do much. I am trying to setup Weewx-WD and Saratoga but I can't understand if the one is pre-requisite for the other and how I can setup both or at least Saratoga (which officially doesn't support Weewx).

Is there anyone here that have successfully installed and ran any or both who could help me ? 

Thanks in Advance!

[gjr80]

Hi Nikolas,

If you are running Weewx then Weewx-WD is a pre-requisite for Saratoga; Weewx-WD generates the data files used by the Saratoga templates to populate the various Saratoga pages. A small number of us use Weewx-WD/Saratoga, no idea how many though.

If you intend to use Weewx-WD/Saratoga I suggest the following approach:
1. Install Weewx and ensure it is working reliably with your station.
2. Once Weewx is working reliably, install Weewx-WD and ensure is operating error free. The Weewx-WD bitbucket site has detailed installation instructions.
3. Once Weewx-WD is working reliably install and configure the Saratoga templates. The Saratoga website provides good instructions on how to install and configure the templates. Remember that as far as the Saratoga templates are concerned Weather Display (WD) is providing the requisite data files so you need to configure the Saratoga templates as if they were being driven by WD (ie download and install the Saratoga WD plugin).

If you have any questions or need further help leave a post here.

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Hi Gary and thanks for your reply.

(1) is O.K. for more than a month now. 

(2) I tried it but It wasn't obvious that WD isn't a Skin.....

(3) I can't find specific instructions for Weewx. Should I consider the templates something relevant to the weather software (i.e. weewx) or something like a HTML template that requires only a working WWW server in order to be installed/configured ?

Thank you in advance!

[gjr80]

Ok, (1) is fine, lets work on (2). I accept there area few mentions of 'this Weewx skin' (or words to that effect) in some of the Weewx-WD documentation, this is a hangover from when Weewx-WD was first developed when it was a single skin but it now more than a skin (in fact at present it consists of five Weewx skins and some custom code) but that is largely irrelevant to its installation if the Weewx-WD installation instructions are followed. Did you download Weewx-WD v0.9.3 and use the the v0.9.3 installation instructions on the Weewx-WD bitbucket site? If not you need to do so, if you did what was the result? What could or could you not do, were there any error messages, what happens when you run Weewx with Weewx-WD? Were there any error messages on screen or in the logs? If there were then can you post error details or log snippets from Weewx startup until the error occurs.

As for (3) there are no specific Weewx instructions. The pre-requisites section in the Weewx-WD installation instructions say the following wrt installing the Saratoga templates:

"If using Weewx-WD to drive the Carter Lake/Saratoga HTML templates then the Carter Lake/Saratoga HTML templates with the Weather Display (WD) plugin need to be installed and configured on your web server. Detailed instructions for installing and configuring the Carter Lake/Saratoga HTML templates with the Weather Display (WD) plugin are available from the Saratoga Weather site."

Buts lets get (2) fixed before we worry about (3)

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Good day Gary,

thanks once more for your reply.

To be honest, I uninstalled Weewx-WD and i am running now exfoliation. I am going to install it again and make all the steps and I'llet you know. If my memory serves me right, I had a error message in the logs but I can't remember what.

So we are moving step by step :)

Thanks for your time !

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Hello Gary,

WD is installed. After following all the instructions related to version 0.9.3 I got the below error in the logs of weewx.

archive: added record 2014-11-11 11:33:00 EET (1415698380) to database 'weewx.sdb'; table 'archive'

Nov 11 11:34:31 rpi weewx[11614]: cheetahgenerator: generated 4 'ToDate' files for Clientraw in 24.54 seconds

Nov 11 11:34:34 rpi weewx[11614]: cheetahgenerator: generated 1 'ToDate' files for SteelGauges in 2.34 seconds

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: cheetahgenerator: generate failed with exception '<class 'NameMapper.NotFound'>'

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: cheetahgenerator: **** ignoring template /etc/weewx/skins/Testtags/testtags.php.tmpl

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: cheetahgenerator: **** reason: cannot find 'yearFormat'

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: ****  Traceback (most recent call last):

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: ****    File "/usr/share/weewx/weewx/cheetahgenerator.py", line 274, in generate

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: ****      print >> _file, text

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: ****    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Cheetah/Template.py", line 1005, in __str__

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: ****      rc = getattr(self, mainMethName)()

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: ****    File "_etc_weewx_skins_Testtags_testtags_php_tmpl.py", line 210, in respond

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: ****  NotFound: cannot find 'yearFormat'

Nov 11 11:35:04 rpi weewx[11614]: cheetahgenerator: generated 0 'ToDate' files for Testtags in 29.66 seconds

This is the error I got when I installed WD for the very first time.

Your help would be really appreciated.

Kind Regards

[gjr80]

Hi Nikolas,

I think we have two issues at work here.

Firstly, have a look at your skin.conf for the Testtags skin. Did you set the [[TimeFormat]] settings as per step 4 in the install instructions, in particular:
year_f = %Y

If not add it in or fix it up, might also be worthwhile checking the other [[TimeFormat]] settings against step 4. Normally, if this setting was omitted there is some code in testtags.php.tmpl that sets a default if year_f is not set but it appears I have a typo in the code. You can easily fix it, edit testtags.php.tmpl and at line 138 or thereabouts I suspect you will find a line:
#$set $yearFormat = "%Y"

You need to delete the $ between the # and the letter s. It should read:
#set $yearFormat = "%Y"

You will then need to save testtags.php.tmpl. No need to restart Weewx, hopefully testtags.php will be generated during the next report cycle.

Hopefully, that is it, let me know how you go.

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Hi Gary,

thanks for your prompt reply. I am in line with the instructions and I didn't touch the time format (I red the comments on side so to prevent any faulty change of the variables).

The typo was indeed the problem. I fixed it (removed the $) but now it seems there is another similar issue:

cheetahgenerator: **** ignoring template /etc/weewx/skins/Testtags/testtags.php.tmpl

Nov 11 12:45:26 rpi weewx[11614]: cheetahgenerator: **** reason: cannot find 'hour'

Nov 11 12:45:26 rpi weewx[11614]: ****  Traceback (most recent call last):

Nov 11 12:45:26 rpi weewx[11614]: ****    File "/usr/share/weewx/weewx/cheetahgenerator.py", line 274, in generate

Nov 11 12:45:26 rpi weewx[11614]: ****      print >> _file, text

Nov 11 12:45:26 rpi weewx[11614]: ****    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Cheetah/Template.py", line 1005, in __str__

Nov 11 12:45:26 rpi weewx[11614]: ****      rc = getattr(self, mainMethName)()

Nov 11 12:45:26 rpi weewx[11614]: ****    File "cheetah__etc_weewx_skins_Testtags_testtags_php_tmpl_1415702391_75_59339.py", line 306, in respond

Nov 11 12:45:26 rpi weewx[11614]: ****  NotFound: cannot find 'hour'

I tried to find some typo but didn't succeed so your help is needed once more :)

Thank for you time once more. 

Nikolas

[gjr80]

Nikolas,

I think we are at the stage where I need to have a look at your Testtags skin.conf, something is not right. Can you please post your Testtags skin.conf. There should be no sensitive info (passwords etc) in there. Also, what type of Weewx install did you do, setup.py, .deb, .rpm?

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Dear Gary,

I did the installation using a .deb package. I run Rasbian distro on a Raspberry Pi model B. You can find the Testtags skin.conf attached. I think I did some minor changes only on some units (I think I changed Degrees_F to Degrees_C). 

Thanks once more for your time and help!

Nikolas

[gjr80]

Thanks Nikolas, skin.conf is fine, the file you posted is identical to the v0.9.3 download copy. Something is clearly amiss elsewhere, it is like the testtags search list extensions are not being run and hence the testtags.php.tmpl template is not able to be populated with the tags from the search list extensions. The additonal $ was not the real cause, just an unfortunate coincidence. I have attached a version of wdSearchX.py that has a few extra debug lines in it that may help us work out what is happening.

Could I ask you to (1) stop Weewx (2) rename /usr/share/weewx/user/wdSearchX.py to wdSearchX_orig.py (or whatever you please) (3) download the attached wdSearchX.py and copy it to the /usr/share/weewx/user folder (4) edit your weewx.conf file and set debug = 1 and finally (5) start Weewx.

This will produce a lot more log entries, can you post the new log from Weewx startup to when the error strikes. Can you also post the [StdReport] and [Engines] sections of your weewx.conf, there should be no sensitive info in these sections but there maybe elsewhere in weewx.conf.

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Gary, 

I attach the output of weewx log (debug.log) with extra debuging enabled. I can't see though any deeper debuging info during the error event than before.

I also attach the sections of the weewx.conf that you requested.

Thank you!

Nikolas

[gjr80]

Ok Nikolas, that has pinpointed the problem. The clues in the debug .log were not the error itself but what did not happen before the report was run - as I suspected none of the testtags search list extensions were being executed. The weewx.conf extract shows why. The [[[CheetahGenerator]]] section under [[Testtags]] is overriding the search_list_extensions setting in the Testtags skin.conf. Weewx-WD does not use the forecast extension so there is no need to run when we are running our Weewx-WD reports (it actually will not cause any problems if it is run in addition to the Weewx-WD search list extensions, it will just use up processor time). The immediate fix is to remove or comment out the [[[CheetahGenerator]]] section under [[Testtags]]. You might also want to rem,ove the [[[Units]]] section immediately under [[[CheetahGenerator]]], it will be overriding the units settings in the skin.conf.

I see you are running the Zambretti forecaster but not using it any reports. Is that intentional or just the remnants of setting up etc. If you do want to use it you would be best to include it under some other skin/report other than Weewx-WD.

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Hello Gary,

I left forecasting there because I have the intention to use it but I didn't know that would cause issues. I have comment out the CheetahGenerator section completely and the units section as well. Now  I am running weewx again to see the result. 

And yes it works...

 reportengine: Found configuration file /etc/weewx/skins/Testtags/skin.conf for report Testtags

Nov 11 16:55:32 rpi weewx[24701]: cheetahgenerator: Running report Testtags for time period ToDate

Nov 11 16:55:32 rpi weewx[24701]: stats: Schema exists with 20 elements

Nov 11 16:56:03 rpi weewx[24701]: cheetahgenerator: generated 1 'ToDate' files for Testtags in 31.19 seconds

Thank you very much for your help and especially for your time! 

Ready to proceed to step 3 now :) :)

[gjr80]

Hi Nikolas,

That is good news. Up to you whether you revert wdSearchX.py to the original version, the version I sent only has some code in it to calculate execution time for each SLE and then log that info if debug is set. I would set debug back to 0 or your logs will get quite large. I expect to have Weewx-WD v0.9.4 out in the next week or so.

As for Saratoga, I will leave that up to you to see how you go. A couple of tips though, 1st, probably a good idea to put the Saratoga template files in their own folder, liable to get a bit congested otherwise. 2nd the key settings you need to set for Saratoga are WXtags and clientrawfile locations in Settings-weather.php and your units of measure and date/time formats in Settings.php. There are other settings you will need to work through, but these are the key ones that will make or break correct operation of the Saratoga templates.

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Good Day Gary!,

thanks again for your help the day before. 

I have already replaced wdSearchX with the original one and disabled extra debug in Weewx. Now I have to figure out how to setup Saratoga. I suppose that other than putting the right values in the configuration files, it's more or less like installing a new site template. I'm just curius how WD knows where saratoga is installed and how interacts with it. Anyway....I will start and see how it goes. I hope you will be available for extra help (I am sure I will need it).

Kind Regards

[gjr80]

No problems. Just to get your mindset right; Saratoga needs to know where the testtags.php and clientraw.txt files are, Weewx/Weewx-WD and Weather Display (if it was in use) has absolutely no knowledge of where Saratoga is or what it is doing, they merely provide some data files that Saratoga finds and reads. Saratoga install is really just a couple of downlaods, unzip, copy and change a few settings.

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Dear Gary,

finally... http://www.graspi.me/weather/index.php

I still look into various customization options. Some images are missing, some paths aren't correct. I hope will bring it up to some acceptable level sooner or later. 

If you have any suggestion or advice please feel free to tell me. 

Thank you once more for your precious help and time.

Nikolas

[gjr80]

Hi Nikolas,

Good effort considering where we were this time yesterday! One idea for you, if you install pyephem you should find your moon details on the main page come up properly and your astronomy page should also then be properly populated. Instructions for installing pyephem can be found here. You will also note that the current conditions always display the sunshine icon and 'Not Available', hopefully will be able to fix that one once Wewx v3 comes out. Will drop you an email in the coming days with a a few other ideas.

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Hi Gary,

yes I have noticed all these things as well the wrong forecast (it gives forecast for a city in Denmark while I am on Athens/Greece). I changed the WU URL but now shows nothing. Auto refresh of the home page doesn't work as well. Very tricky template and configuration. 

Thanks for the suggestion. I am going to try it. And I suppose you mean Weewx v.3... right ? That's great news indeed. Please keep me informed.

Thanks for your patience and time. I really appreciate it. 

Nikolas 

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Good day again!

I hope Gary will see this message.

I am stuck with SteelSeries Gauges. I don't know where from should I start in order to have them work. The necessary support file is generated but that's all I have up to now.  Any help would be appreciated as always.

Kind Regards

[gjr80]

Hello Nikolas,

I gather from your post that other than generating customclientraw.txt you have not done too much else to get the SteelSeries gauges to display. Not to worry the process is fairly straightforward, have you read the SteelSeries page in the Cumulus wiki? The basic steps you need to follow are:

1. Download/extract/copy the SteelSeries files to a folder on your web server. Download link at the bottom of the wiki page.
2. Edit the SteelSeries file gauges.js to use customclientraw.txt as its source. Refer to the 'Weather Display Users' section of the wiki, ignore the instructions about the customclientrawlocal.txt file in Weather Display.
3. Edit any other settings in gauges.js (as per the wiki) to suit your needs. Suggest you get the basic gauges working first before doing too much.
4. Open a page in your browser that displays the gauges, if you have Weewx-WD working with the Saratoga templates then when you installed the WD-plugin you should have ended up with a file named wxssgauges.php in your Saratoga folder. Opening that file should display the gauges in a Saratoga formatted page.

See how that goes.

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Hello Gary,

thank you again for your help and kindness. I've got gauges working finally. Have a look here http://www.graspi.me/weather/wxssgauges.php

One more question. Saratoga template has a reference to "Graphs" but there are no graphs (you can click on Graphs menu to see what I am talking about). Also, gauges should have a tooltip depicting graphs when you put mouse cursor over. These graphs also don't work. Are those two "graphs" related and how can I have them working too ? 

Thank you in advance !

[gjr80]

Hello Nikolas,

My apologies for not replying earlier. Regarding the Graphs page, as Saratoga believes it is operating with Weather Display Saratoga attempts to display three Weather Display graphs which cover 24 hours, 72 hours and month to date respectively with plots of all observations included on each graph. Weewx can accomodate the timeframes and even the .gif format used by Weather Display but plotting all obs on a single graph cannot be done in a presently be done in a manner that poroduces a presentable result. Personally I find these sorts of 'plot everything' graphs to be confusing unless well presented. I do have a replacement wxgraphs.php that will display the standard Weewx generated plots over 24 hours, last week, last month and last year. Let me see if I can dig out the page and I will post it for you if you are interested.

As for the mouseover graphs it is a fairly straightforward task to get them to work, the graphs are produced (using JpGraph I think) on the fly and cached from data in the clientraw files, I found most of them rather poor quality and changed my page to display larger Weewx generated plots. Nonetheless I will see if I can find the steps you need to follow to implement the mouseover graphs.

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Hello Gary,

don't even mention it. Your help and time are much appreciated.

I have changed a bit the html template of Standard Skin in order to keep only the graphs and present it to the Saratoga. Of course this is not the best solution as it doesn't look part of the Saratoga. 

I would really appreciate if you can tell me how to implement the mouse over tooltips. 

Kind Regards

[gjr80]

Nikolas,

I managed to find the Saratoga page I modified to display Weewx generated day/week/month/year plots. Getting the new page to display Weewx generated plots will require changes to Saratoga and Weewx. Weewx changes are essentially adding a new/modding an existing skin to produce the plots required (could use existing Weewx plots if you are generating them but I found them too small, if you decide to use them there will be some modification of the wxgraphs2.php to use those files). Saratoga changes involve a modified wxgraphs.php. What we have tried to do, where possible, is to make Weewx-WD and any add-ons produce output that lets Saratoga operate as if it was being fed by Weather Display with the only changes being the standard setting changes in the likes of Settings-weather.php etc. That way if the Saratoga code changes  in the future we are not caught out. This is important for pages such as the those that pull down Weather Underground forecast data (and have chnaged quite a bit recently) but less so for a fairly basic page like wxgraphs.php. So for that reason I am reasonably happy to modify wxgraphs.php to make use of the greater graphing flexibility that Weewx has. One way to mitigate a possible future change is to call the page by another name, say wxgraphs2.php or wxgraphsweewx.php. I leave that up to you. Just wanted to make you aware of what we have done/will do so that you are are not surprised if Saratoga brings out some updated pages in the future.

Instructions

Saratoga.
- copy the attached wxgraphs2.php to your Saratoga folder and rename (or leave it) as required.
- edit Settings-weather.php and check that $SITE['graphImageDir'] is set to the location your graphs are saved. Location is irrelevant, as long as Saratoga knows where they are and can access them
- save Settings-weather.php
- if not overwriting wxgraphs.php you may wish to modify your Saratoga menu by editing flyout-menu.xml. I see that you have added your gauges page to your menu so assume you know what you are doing here.

Weewx. Have attached the skin.conf that I was using to generate my windrose and Saratoga graphs, you only need the [ImageGenerator] section, mainly included the file for completeness.
- copy the [ImageGenerator] section from attached skin.conf and place it in the skin.conf of the skin (new or existing) that you will use to produce the graphs
- look through the list of plots to be generated, some may not be required or may not be possible given your station, eg [[[[radiation]]]] and [[[[UV]]]] are not so common. If you know you can't generate such graphs then you can delete the lines calling the graph or comment them out, otherwise you may well get complaints from Weewx. Either way you need to comment out/delete the graph name, the observation being graphed as well as (if they exist) any settings particular to that graph. If you get rid of some graphs eg barometer then you will need to change the code in wxgraphs2.php as it expects certain graphs. Won't go into the details here but if you want to do this just ask. Display of UV and radiation graphs rely on settings in Settings-weather.php so if you don't have either or both as long as Settings-weather.php is set correctly there is no need to modify wxgraphs2.php.
- check the generator_list setting of the skin.conf of the skin you will be using and ensure that 'weewx.imagegenerator.ImageGenerator' has been included in the list of generators to be run. If it has not add it, noting generators need to be separated by a comma.
- save skin.conf
- if creating a new skin for the graphs ensure that it will be called by Weewx by ensuring it is included in the [StdReport] section of weewx.conf. Fairly standard stuff, but by way of example this is what I have:

    # Generate Saratoga Graphs
    [[SaratogaGraphs]]
        HTML_ROOT = /var/www/WD
        skin = SaratogaGraphs

- save weewx.conf if it was changed
- if weewx.conf was changed then do a reload (eg 'sudo service weewx reload' works for me) or a stop/start Weewx. If weewx.conf was not modified then the graphs should be generated on the next archive period.

Assuming the graphs are generated, opening wxgraphs2.php should display them. If not you may get errors on the page, most likely that a graph file does not exist, we can deal with that if and when it occurs.

Assuming things are working, you can go on and customise the look and feel of the plots in the [ImageGenerator] section of skin.conf eg change background colours, line colours etc. The skin.conf I sent you has my customised colours/setting in [ImageGenerator] and they may not be to your taste.

Hopefully that will do the job.

Will see what I can find about SteelSeries mouseover plots.

Gary

[Nikolas Kallianiotis]

Good day Gary,

Graphs are up and running. The instructions were pretty straight forward. Thank you very much once more for your time and help. One question, have you tried Weewx v. 3.0 ? What problems may be faced with WD and saratoga after uprgading ?

Kind Regards

On Monday, November 10, 2014 2:33:59 PM UTC+2, Nikolas Kallianiotis wrote:

Hello People,

I am sorry for the double post but I wanted to change topic subject but I couldn't find how. Please delete the old one.

I have tried a lot but missing Python knowledge I can't do much. I am trying to setup Weewx-WD and Saratoga but I can't understand if the one is pre-requisite for the other and how I can setup both or at least Saratoga (which officially doesn't support Weewx).

Is there anyone here that have successfully installed and ran any or both who could help me ? 

Thanks in Advance!

[gjr80]

Hi Nikolas,

Good news about the graphs. Yes, have been running v3 on my test system. The current version of Weewx-WD is not comptible with v3, I have been putting together a new version of Weewx-WD that is v3 compatible, its running but needs a few things tidied up. Hopefully once v3 is released proper we will have a v3 compatible Weewx-WD released within a few days.

Gary

[Mike Harold Chan]

On Tuesday, December 2, 2014 at 8:03:49 PM UTC+8, gjr80 wrote:

Hello,

I noticed on my weewx-WD doesnt generate my "$sunshinehourstodateday"  or sunshine hours on my testtags.php, I checked it using sce=view and only shows ZERO, how can I add value for $sunshinehourstodateday tags to work? TY

[gjr80]

Hi,

Unfortunately WeeWX-WD does not calculate sunshine hours and consequently the $sunshinehourstodateday tag is not populated. The only way you could get WeeWX-WD to populate the $sunshinehourstodateday tag would be to have WeeWX somehow calculate the value and modify the testtags.php.tmpl template to use that result. Other than having a proper sunshine recorder some folks has estimated sunshine using a threshold level on a solar radiation sensor, I seem to recall somewhere someone had implemented such an arrangement with WeeWX. You might find more by searching the user or development forums for “sunshine” or “sunshine hours”.

Gary

[Mike Harold Chan]

Good Day gary,

Well thats a bad news to me actually this is important specially Solar Panel users which we can monitor the sunshine hours which we could setup solar panel rotator following the actual sunshine hours for maximum solar power productivity. I hope someday someone who could add it on weewx-WD :(

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