I’m fiddling around with trying to modify the PiConsole to get its data from the local UDP broadcasts rather than from the WF REST data and have it mostly ready enough for others to try, if anybody has interest.
If so, let me know via PM and we can coordinate via email
[…TL;DR…]
Architecturally it requires the following:
install and run my wfudptools listener with a certain set of command-line options so the data is saved to /var/tmp tmpfs files, to not write to SD card
modify a couple files in Peter’s product
very lightly edit your .ini file
Testing is very reversible. Basically “cp -a” the wfpiconsole tree to another name for safekeeping, do the few modifications above, and fire it up. Reversing it is just putting the original official wfpiconsole directory back into place.
Note - there ‘are’ some limitations of going with UDP for data because that API does not provide accumulated data (rain, strikes) nor trends (min/max), but for a realtime display it works pretty nicely. Also would support indoor data from a Air with some modifications if that’s important to you.
Long term goals - I hope to go further to let weewx be the listener and map to some standard kind of schema for the data, which would let the PiConsole display data from any of the 70+ vendors and stations that weewx supports. Initially I’m doing just the Tempest to see how well the vision might work out long term.
Again - please let me know if you have any interest and we can coordinate via email.
This is certainly an interesting thing, especially for the case where there is no internet access, and PiConsole would still display the basic data from Tempest.
However, the ideal solution would be if @peter could build such functionality into PiConsole, and for the local station it could be switched to UDP mode.
Or, if PiConsole found Tempest UDP traffic on the local network, it would offer to display that weather station as well, and fill in the missing information from the cloud if it also had Internet access.
Can’t you and @peter agree on some kind of collaboration so that it is still a single software product?
Personally, I would like to run both options simultaneously
I’m certainly not trying to do an integrated product nor support one. All I’m trying to do is use the PiConsole to display data coming from other kinds of sources.
We ‘are’ talking about integrating the small changes to the PiConsole code needed to make that possible.
The PiConsole is really great for what it does, so I’m trying to leverage it’s very slick look’n’feel for data coming from other sources. Basically anything that can generate JSON following the WF UDP API could probably work.
I think I’m going to punt at this time on this one. It’s just too complicated under the hood for me to reverse engineer enough. Sorry if I got anybody’s hopes up too much.
hey … sounds like something similar to what Gary Funk did a few years back. I still have a rpi running with it still doing it’s thing.
Not sure what happened to Gary or his project “ArchiveSW” it also allowed a sensor attached to the GPIO - for indoor temperature. I really liked having it as a backup - and the best part is it is totally local.
And… This is exactly how WeatherBox is doing it… All data that WeatherBox displays is via the local UDP (or from other station types: Davis, Peet etc).
And you get a local -network web display in addition to the internet based display.
Just sayin’.
WxBox is still on beta form…but getting more and more stable by the day.
If you have found this thread and are looking for information about different methods to extract and display your data you may be interested in this thread:
