Kestrel 4500 NV weather meter interface for Raspberry Pi

[Scott Irwin]

I am a weather fanatic and new to the raspberry pi world. I recently figured out how to create a weather fax receiver out of a pi4 and a software defined radio. It works great. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=260690&p=1594172&hilit=weather+fax#p1594172

Now I want to use the raspberry pi as a weather station. 

A quick google shows there are tons of examples of how to do this. Some options involving connecting to an external arduino weather station you build yourself with sensors. Other examples include installing sensors to the pi board itself.

I want to connect my Kestrel 4500 NV Pocket Weather Tracker to my Raspberry Pi using the bluetooth interface. There is software that exists in the Windows world that allows me to do this. I cannot find any reference to being able to pull this off through my Raspberry Pi.

I don't need to post information to Weather Underground or other 3rd party apps. I would like to record data collected on kestrel as well as view real-time data being collected through some type of GUI on the Pi. 

I don't know much about weewx other than the Kestrel device is not listed as a supported device. Is there an easy hack that would allow me to pull data from the Kestrel onto the Raspberry Pi?

Any ideas? Thanks for any help you can provide.

Scott

[rich T]

Here is a link for a Bluetooth enabled WX station.  It might provide some insight. https://github.com/daduke/ventusw820

[Scott Irwin]

Thanks. I'm going to check it out and I'll follow up with the thread if I am successful.

Scott

[Scott Irwin]

I wanted to follow up on this thead to see if anyone could help point me in the right direction.

I figured out how to interface with the Kestrel meter via bluetooth on my raspberry pi4. I ended up configuring a bluetooth serial port and using an app called minicom. See here for directions:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=262406&p=1599144#p1599144

Using the communication protocols provided by the Kestrel Weather Meter manufacture....see here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzTEsrIDO36ua3ZMWGx4a09mV3ptNE5oT2RsNW9maDU3aFFn/view?usp=sharing

.....I was able to communicate with the device and return data sets. For example, I can return the following ASCII dataset:

DT,MG,TR,WS,CW,HW,TP,WC,RH,HI,DP,WB,BP,AL,DA

s,Mag,True,mph,mph,mph,▒F,▒F,%,▒F,▒F,▒F,mb,ft,ft

631207800,---,---,0.0,0.0,0.0,70.4,70.3,62.8,70.3,57.1,61.9,1017.7,-133,822

631209600,---,---,0.0,0.0,0.0,70.6,70.7,62.8,70.9,57.3,62.2,1017.4,-128,848

631211400,---,---,0.0,0.0,0.0,70.6,70.5,62.9,70.5,57.3,62.2,1017.7,-135,831

631213200,---,---,0.0,0.0,0.0,70.0,70.0,63.4,70.0,57.0,61.9,1017.9,-138,792

631215000,---,---,0.0,0.0,0.0,69.4,69.4,59.3,68.9,54.6,60.3,1018.0,-141,730

631216800,---,---,0.0,0.0,0.0,71.1,71.1,67.1,71.6,59.6,63.7,1018.1,-143,875

The first column is a time stamp, the other columns are wind speed, wind direction, temp. etc......

I can obtain this info by sending the Kestrel device a command.

QUESTION: What do I need to do to get weewx to send the command and collect/record the data it receives?

Do I need to build some sort of interface or driver? Is that what the link above to the ventus weather station is doing? Do I need to learn python? I'm OK with a conceptual answer and I'm willing to google and learn.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Scott

On Sunday, January 19, 2020 at 9:31:18 AM UTC-8, rich T wrote:

[Scott Irwin]

I thought I would follow up on my question below in the event any newbies like me search for this in the future.

So the answer to my question is, yes I need to create my own driver. There are two guides I am going to use.....

http://www.weewx.com/docs/customizing.htm#porting

and......an existing bluetooth driver that was referenced above (same link is here for convenience: https://github.com/daduke/ventusw820)

I'll play around with the directions for creating my own and follow up on the post if I find success.