RemoteWeather: new software that supports AirGradient!

[desertdefender]

Got my O-1PST installed yesterday and I added support for gathering data from AirGradient devices to my weather software, RemoteWeather.

What is RemoteWeather? It’s a modern weather server supporting several popular weather stations (more on the way), as well as other climate devices like the AirGradient and my homemade automatic snow gauge. RW is designed to handle many different stations and instruments simultaneously from a single instance. You could, for example, have dozens of AirGradient devices being polled every 3 seconds and it would handle them easily.

The software is distributed as a single binary and the data is stored in TimescaleDB on the back. RemoteWeather serves up several different types of websites from a single instances:

• a live weather website for each station that streams weather (and air quality data!) and updates every 3 seconds. Even the charts are live and get updated as data comes in.
  See my home station: https://suncrestweather.com/.
• a web-based management interface for configuring and monitoring your devices and websites (see screenshot)
• a portal that lets you view live data from all of your stations on a map (see live demo here–kind of boring with just one station but I hope to expand later)

I built RemoteWeather for me and my home stations but I’ve been thinking about releasing this as open source software. Technically, it’s available already but the docs are totally out-of-date and wrong and I don’t think anybody would be able to get it going until the docs are re-written and a tutorial written/filmed.

Is this something that people here would be interested in?

[Achim_AirGradient]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Is there a link to a website explaining it more, eg what weather stations it supports, what kind of server it needs to run etc. ?

[desertdefender]

Not yet, but I will work on writing one.

Currently, it supports these stations:

• Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 and other Davis stations that support the serial protocol that they’ve used forever
• Campbell Scientific data loggers with a CRBasic program that outputs data in JSON
• Ambient Weather stations that support the “customized server” feature (this is not well tested yet)
• Any software that can send readings over gRPC (I use this for my DIY snow gauge)

The software relies on the TimescaleDB database (built on PostgreSQL), so you will need a computer capable of running that. It’s written in Go, so it will run on Linux, Windows, macOS, *BSD, etc.

It also supports a mode where you can have a local Raspberry Pi that reads the data from your station and sends it to a remote server (over gRPC) in the cloud where you keep your database. This makes solar powered installations more practical.

[Zzz]

RW looks great! I would be interested to check it out!

[farzadb]

This looks great! Would love to see it documented and released.

[desertdefender]

For those of you interested, do you also run a personal weather station? If so, could you tell me a little about it?

• What station(s) do you have?
• What software do you currently use with it?
• Does it upload data to any online weather services? Which ones?
• Have you integrated AirGradient equipment into your PWS?
• Any other weather equipment?

Did some more development on RW over the holiday weekend:

I added some colorization to the air quality graphs to make them easier to understand.

Digging into the internals of the AirGradient inspired me to learn ESP32 and build something. I designed a PCB for my open source automated snow gauge and I’ve sent it off for fabrication. This is my first PCB and my first experience with ESP32; I’m replacing a hand-built gauge that uses RPi. If this works, I hope to redesign it with integrated ESP32 on the board and use SMDs. I’m not sure how many people care about snow gauges, though! I live on top of a mountain in Utah and I get a ridiculous amount of snow, so it’s helpful to monitor it.

[Flatspot]

desertdefender, this looks very interesting.

I run a weather station with associated sensors here at home to help manage gardens and an orchard. I have an EcoWitt with various components - anemometer/wind vane/solar-UV monitor; outdoor temp/humidity/dewpoint/VPD; indoor temp/humidity/pressure; rainfall; lightning; several soil temp/moisture sites; attic temp/humidity. EcoWitt makes all the Ambient weather station components so there should be few issues in integrating data from EcoWitt. So far I do not upload any data to any weather services and have not integrated my AirGradient outdoor into the PWS display since I am not sure where to start. I also have a couple of sensors for monitoring a small greenhouse, a SensorPush HTP.xw and another to monitor temps in a freezer, and HT.w. I would be interested in getting everything to one unified display.

I hope to see your project mature. I like the updated displays of air quality data.

[desertdefender]

@Flatspot This kind of use case–multiple stations and sensors–is exactly what I designed RW for.

I actually bought an EcoWitt GW3000 to use as a data relay for the WS-5000 and one of their soil moisture sensors, too. I just haven’t had a chance to set it up yet because I need to weld up a tower mount for it. Hope to get that and the snow gauge up soon.

My software will store timeseries data for all of these components. Displaying it on the website will take some more effort. Right now, the live weather website is designed for a single station plus an optional AirGradient device and optional snow gauge.

If you’re looking to display a bunch of ag metrics, you’ll need a modified website design. I might be able to help you with that once I get caught up on these projects.

[desertdefender]

While working on the ESP32 snow gauge, I decided to put together a little CYD ESP32-based console for live weather and readings from the AirGradient.

The display streams live weather and air quality readings every 4 seconds and local forecasts from Xweather API every 20 minutes.

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9W-5Qv80Pk

[Rog]

Weather centre
I have a Davis Vantage Pro2 fitted with a Davis Solar sensor, with console
The console is connected via the network output (not USB)

I run the Davis Weatherlink software on my PC
I also run Weather Display on my PC and, like Weatherlink, that gets the data via Davis. As a consequence only one or the other software can be run in real time without causing problems (it appears that Davis only supports one direct connection for data downloads to remote software at any one time).
Although I use the software on the PC, its main use is that I do a backup of both each day as a means of having past records available, and also for the NOAA reports options. As a display etc., I find that HA gives me the flexibility to show what I want where, whilst giving me easy to use graph options etc.

The Davis sends data to Weather Underground

Meteobridge weather centre data receivers
I also have a Meteobridge Pro and (recently) a Meteobridge Pro2. Both of these receive data from the same Vantage Pro above

The MB Pro sends data to Weather Underground and to Windy
When I get around to it, the MBPro2 will be the one sending data instead of the MBPro.
The MBPro and MBPro2 are both on the same network

Home Assistant
I run the Meteobridge Datalogger integration in Home Assistant. At present, Datalogger currently has both my MBPro and the MBPro2 linked with it, but the MBPro will be removed at some point.

Unlike the Davis, there are no conflicts with getting data multiple times at the same time.

I did try the Weatherlink and Davis Vantage integrations, but there were some compatibility problems, or whatever. I can’t remember what exactly, but one of them was related to the Davis data sending limitations. another thing was that I preferred the MB output in HA because it gave more entities that were useful to be - i.e. ‘Is it freezing’ type of thing.

Air Gradient
I have both the indoor and outdoor current AG models, but nothing linked to a PWS - I assume that my Davis doesn’t support it. Data from the out AG is sent to the AG map.

[desertdefender]

@Rog

Home Assistant
I run the Meteobridge Datalogger integration in Home Assistant. At present, Datalogger currently has both my MBPro and the MBPro2 linked with it, but the MBPro will be removed at some point.

Unlike the Davis, there are no conflicts with getting data multiple times at the same time.

I have a Davis Vantage Pro2 as well. RW supports that station and also supports the reading from the Envoy, which is a WiFi/Ethernet bridge to the 900Mhz station radio.

I don’t own a MeteoBridge but it appears to support a “HTTP event” where it issues GET requests with the live data. That will be trivial to support and I will add a driver for it if you’d like to give RW a shot.

The main advantage of RW is that you pull the data into a single app (RW) and it gets stored in a time-series database and multiplexed out to all of the popular weather services. You also get support for AirGradient and hyper-local forecasts from Xweather, plus the fastest-loading live charts that I’ve seen.

[Rog]

I’d certainly give it a try. From what I’ve seen of what you posted, it looks interesting.

[Michael_J]

Is this available? I didn’t see a link to get the software.