Tempest (w/o internet) providing consistent data gaps to WeeWx

Tempest Owners
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So yesterday my internet went out for the first time since having my Tempest setup and I found strange data gaps in my weewx setups. I have 3 raspberry pis running weewx (I guess that’s what you do when you have spare ones around and are tinkering with different setups) as it seems to be the best setup I have found to capture/archive/use my data from the Tempest. My understanding/expectation was that the Tempest would continue to broadcast data within my network even though the internet was down and that my weewx systems would still capture and make available for viewing.

Initially I thought weewx was not working because of the internet being down, but upon closer inspection and over time I found weewx was running and making entries into the weewx.sdb every 5 minutes as it should, but there was “blank” data for about 2hr, then actual data for about 2 hours and this frequency continued until my internet came back. The other curious thing is that while most entries were blank during the alternating 2 hr segments, it appears the wind data was being collected through most of these “down” times. Now if I had one weewx setup doing this I may assumed weewx was the problem but all three systems showed this same behavior and the 2 hrs segments “with data” and “without data” where the same. This made me wonder if it had to do with how the Tempest hub was broadcasting the data during the internet time being down. That being said once the internet came back online and the Tempest website was backfilled, the backfilled data was complete with no gaps.

Capture wind
Capture wind1275×907 39.2 KB
weewxerror2
weewxerror21261×445 34.5 KB

Here is a capture of the weewx debug log during one of the “gaps” showing weewx.sdb entries:

weewxlog
weewxlog1562×452 25.2 KB

Any ideas, where the issue might be coming from or where to start looking? I’m at a loss, but want to try to avoid this in the future.

Related to this is there is a better solution to reliably capture all the data, whether I have internet or not? I chose weewx because it seems robust and provides data capture and presentation that I am looking for that the Tempest App/Website are lacking in my opinion. Also, is there anyway to extract data from the tempest website and backfill weewx or any other program for that matter?

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Nothing abnormal in the logs that I see, except the lack of data for the reports it is building.

When the Internet went down, was it the connection that failed or your firewall/router/wifi access point? If it is an all-in-one, did it shut down the local wifi or ethernet when the Internet link dropped?

I have personally never simulated an Internet failure to see how the recovery works, since my main Hub is ancient and doesn’t have the buffer feature that everyone else’s has. Does it buffer/replay rapid_wind???

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The internet went down between my DSL ISP provider and my home (turns out the maintenance work they were doing screwed up my connection). I have a Unifi network with individual firewall/router/switches/APs and everything internal worked fine (SSH, VNC into pi’s, wireless & wired etc).

I’m not sure how long the hub will buffer/save the data but at least over 24hrs as all data is now showing online. I’m also not sure the details of how/what it broadcast when the internet connection is lost vs up (maybe no change). I did notice when I connected my phone/app to the hub via bluetooth, the app only shows the most current values and shows no historical.

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There is this option for capturing data regardless of the internet and will run on a pi while it also runs weewx without a problem: ArchiveSW - Display & Data Archive Storage
Special thanks to @GaryFunk
cheers Ian :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the info, I will check it out.

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I haven’t pushed up the Tempest files. Something I really need to do

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You can alternately use my UDP listener and feed influxdb directly if you wanted to go in that direction, then do a simple grafana dashboard to display the saved data any way you want.

There are undoubtedly a half-dozen ways including Gary’s app which he already mentioned.

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