Grafana graphs for lightning and rain

Hi!

I just started playing around with weewx and Grafana. So far so good! I have a carpet plot set up for temperature which looks really cool (and tells me what I need to know at a glance!)

carpetplot

With that said, I haven’t had much success in graphing/charting rain or lightning strikes.
Does anyone have any ideas on how I could do that within Grafana? It seems like every type of chart i use for either rain or lightning doesn’t accurately display the data, or (more often) just looks super confusing.

lightning

I’m new to both Grafana and data science, so maybe I’m just conceptualizing rain & lightning wrong. Does anyone have a similar set up as me using Grafana? How did you create your graphs?

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i use influxdb to store things via telegraf subscribing to MQTT topics that I generate by running a UDP listener python script I wrote, then display a dashboard in grafana that picks things from influxdb as a data source. Works ok for me. If I ever get back to it, I’m going to tweak my listener to just write to influxdb directly and skip the MQTT middle-man.

I ignore lightning, as the sensor isn’t giving me any accurate data worth anything for me.

For rain, I did cook up a grafana plot that nicely shows rain measurements for a day with an overlaid total ‘for’ the day generated by a Sum of the individual points of data. Zooming out to make the grafana time span a week seemed to do the right thing re: totalling stuff up and showing a running total.

Unfortunately WF rain measurement is pretty useless currently, as their continuous learning for rain is a work still in progress, so I personally just ignore anything rain I get from the WF gear at this time.

(at work - can’t provide any examples of grafana that I didn’t post elsewhere here some months ago)

I like your temperature graph a lot. The lightning plot maybe a little less-so, as it’s hard to see what it’s actually displaying with no labeling of the Y axis with what you’re trying to display.

Re: graphing and displaying stuff like this in general, I’d suggest you check out the weewx-user group in Google Groups and search there a bit. There have been lots of folks who’ve cooked up cool heat-map and summary kinds of plots for weather data. Also check out wxforum.net forums for ideas. Both will probably get you thinking about possibilities that work for you.

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How did you set up that carpet plot in Grafana? I’ve just started playing around with it and mostly just end up with simple plots or nothing at all.

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Configuration > Plugins > Search for “Carpet Plot”

There’s also a ton of other types of graphing available via plugins too.