Jump to content

Direct, local injection of WeatherFlow data into RainMachine


Bumbershoot

Recommended Posts

Posted

A couple of people on these boards have expressed interest in directly injecting WeatherFlow data into RainMachine irrigation controllers (bypassing "the cloud" for local data), and it turns out this is possible now, using a couple of open sourced tools. It took me a couple of hours over the weekend to figure out how to do it, but I can state that it works on both a RPi and a Mac Mini.  I think Windows users are SOL for now.

A caveat to this is that it appears that RainMachine is intending to directly support WeatherFlow weather stations, which I suspect will happen sooner than later.  Even so, here's a brief outline of what's involved.  This assumes moderate *nix sysadmin skills, and that RainMachine, WeatherFlow and your RPi are on the same network.  If these devices are not on the same network, then the skill level rises.  As it is, it's mostly editing config files and running a binary to add extensions to weewx.  If you bothered set up Polyglot prior to version 2, or even NodeLink, then you'll have some idea of the difficulty.

  • Install and configure weewx on your RPi
  • Install and configure the WeatherFlow-UDP driver into weewx
  • Install and configure the weewx-realtime-clientraw extension into weewx
  • On your RainMachine web page, navagate to "Settings | Weather | Weather Services (Developer tab) | PWS" and set the location of the 'clientraw.txt' file that weewx creates, and you're good to go.

In order for RainMachine to get to the 'clientraw.txt' file, you'll have to find a way to make it available on your network, such as enabling Apache on the RPi, or Samba, etc.  I enabled Apache on my Mac Mini.

Again, the likely easiest way to accomplish this is to wait for RainMachine to enable a native solution in a firmware update.  They indicate that this is "under development", and I think there's some urgency for them to produce a product now that WUnderground quit issuing new API keys, which undermines a key feature of their product.

Good luck, this works for me™.

  • 1 month later...
Posted

Bumbershoot,

I don't have a RainMachine but can appreciate those that do so thank you so much for your contributions. As stated in various forums 2018 will be just the beginning of sexy weather reporting, monitoring, and integration!

Thank You!

 

 

Posted
3 hours ago, Teken said:

Bumbershoot,

I don't have a RainMachine but can appreciate those that do so thank you so much for your contributions. As stated in various forums 2018 will be just the beginning of sexy weather reporting, monitoring, and integration!

Thank You!

 

 

That's very nice of you, and thanks.  I suspect that RainMachine fans may get a much better interface sometime soon.  I don't know that @bpwwer has anything to do with that, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I'll extend your thanks, along with mine, to the developers who're creating this whole ecosystem.  As far as I can tell, they're brilliant!

Posted
39 minutes ago, Bumbershoot said:

That's very nice of you, and thanks.  I suspect that RainMachine fans may get a much better interface sometime soon.  I don't know that @bpwwer has anything to do with that, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I'll extend your thanks, along with mine, to the developers who're creating this whole ecosystem.  As far as I can tell, they're brilliant!

A WeatherFlow local data parser was just merged into the RainMachine git repository for testing. It can be downloaded from https://github.com/sprinkler/rainmachine-developer-resources/blob/master/sdk-parsers/RMParserFramework/parsers/wf-parser.py and loaded manually.

Posted
30 minutes ago, bpwwer said:

A WeatherFlow local data parser was just merged into the RainMachine git repository for testing. It can be downloaded from https://github.com/sprinkler/rainmachine-developer-resources/blob/master/sdk-parsers/RMParserFramework/parsers/wf-parser.py and loaded manually.

Whoa, it works!  It's hot out where I live, and water is a bit scarce this year, so I'll watch closely how your WF parser compares to the others I've enabled in my Rainmachine.

This makes me happy, kind sir!  Thank you!

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...