OS-WEEWX compatibility question

[Kruse Ludington]

Does WEEX run on Debian OS on the Raspberry PI? I am currently using Raspbian OS (that the RPI came with), but I am being somewhat "pushed" to change it....

That may sound "odd" but below is the reason why -

Current setup:

My long term goal was to use my Raspberry PI for a bunch of stuff, not just WEEWX and here is a slight compatibility problem. Hardware and software setup listed below, then main question is at the bottom:

Hardware:

• Raspberry PI 4 (8GB Ram and booting off of an SSD so it is pretty fast). 
• Connected to a fiber 1GB connection by ethernet for reliability
• Running it headless (access over local network via VNC & Telnet) -
• Bluetooth, sound and HDMI ports all turned off to maximize available CPU. The weather station is an AmbientWeather WS-2902C about 9 months old.

Software:

• I have WEEWX running like a top (very well) and recently updated it to the latest version. It is using the "Interceptor" driver to listen to the weather station  to collect the data, and sends data out to ten places: Windy, Wundergound, WindGuru, OWM, Meteoservices, Weather365, PWSWeather, WeatherCloud, AWEKA and WOW
  
• Running on the default OS that came with the RPI (which I consistently keep up to date via VNC) - Raspbian.
• Partially as learning excercise,  I have two two decent scripts running on it:
  • One that turns it's fans on when the CPU exceeds 65 degrees celcius and turns back off when it drops below 55 celcius.
  • A nightly reboot script as a cron job that emails me with details on processes first shut-down and then gently reboots the RPI (takes place a few minutes after my router reboots in the middle of the night).
• Home Assistant* ("Supervised" version), which is pretty involved but can do amazing things regarding home automation. It was pure luck that there is also a very good integration with the AmbientWeather weather station that I am using so I can set up lights in certain rooms to turn on automatically with brightness that is inversely proportional to the berightness outside, send reminders to close specific windows that are open when it starts raining, remind me to close the garage if left open too long, etc., etc., etc.,

The creator of Home Assistant is a company named "Nabu Casa". The vast majority of Home Assistant users run their setup on a dedicated machine with the Home Assistant OS. With that setup, they do not allow ANY other software to run on the machine. There is one exception which I am using, and that is to run Home Assistant on Debian OS in a container - and that is what I am doing - even so, they still insist I use Debian, as my setup is considerd "unsupported" (ugh)... (They also alow me to run it in a VM but I haven't gone that route).

I was also thinking maybe I would get a dedicated mini PC or a second RPI and have them talk to each other, but #1 that's not in the budget right now, and 2. it might be overkill... (RPI CPU levels and temperature is still within very acceptable limits)...

Thoughts?

[Karen K]

Support people can be very special if they don't see their favorite setup. Sigh. 

[vince]

There is no need to change your os to add Home Assistant under docker...

But to answer:

• weewx runs fine on debian on any hardware, as well as debian derivatives (RaspiOS, Ubuntu)

• Home Assistant in docker runs fine on a pi4 over RaspiOS

• If you purchase a Flirc case for your pi4 it will idle under 50C with no reboots required.

While you can run HA and weewx on the same pi, be aware that HA does a lot of disk writes and this might stress your SD card.  Even on a pi4 you might find the HA performance a bit slow.  I started that way here and moved HA to a i3 NUC in docker (over ubuntu LTS) and it is much more responsive and stable.

Ignore the HA people saying 'you must run debian'.  They're referring to adding HA on top of an os, not running HA in a 'container' under Docker.  It doesn't matter what os you're running docker on really.