Using Weather watcher INDI driver with Ekos

[AstroMuni]

I wish to use INDI weather watcher driver with Ekos. I have Ekos running on Linux Mint. I would like it to connect to a service such as weathermap.org. My programming skills are near zero but having coded over 20years ago (in now ancient languages), can read some code 🙂

Has anyone else done this? If so need tips on achieving this please.

@wimvb I recall seeing your post in the INDI forum about something similar. Did you get it working?

Edited October 25, 2021 by AstroMuni

[wimvb]

1 hour ago, AstroMuni said:

I recall seeing your post in the INDI forum about something similar. Did you get it working?

I did a proof of concept, but never found a good place to set it up permanently. And the one long usb power cable I had failed. So far I haven’t followed up on this. The weather station that I used also lacked rain and wind sensors, and those are the two most critical sensors in any observatory warning system. There ’s still a lot to do before it can be deployed, but most of that is straight forward. If only I could stop procrastinating. 😁

[AstroMuni]

27 minutes ago, wimvb said:

The weather station that I used also lacked rain and wind sensors, and those are the two most critical sensors in any observatory warning system.

Hence I wanted to make a start using an online service rather than build my own station. A couple of friends have reported decent predictions from this source.

[wimvb]

@AstroMuni: I haven't tried connecting to a weather service. My guess is that you need to do some reformatting of the response of the weather service. Have you found anything in the tutorials?

[AstroMuni]

14 hours ago, wimvb said:

@AstroMuni: I haven't tried connecting to a weather service. My guess is that you need to do some reformatting of the response of the weather service. Have you found anything in the tutorials?

Where are the tutorials? My coding skills are quite outdated from 20+ years ago so will be uphill battle 🙂

[wimvb]

7 hours ago, AstroMuni said:

Where are the tutorials? My coding skills are quite outdated from 20+ years ago so will be uphill battle 🙂

It's been a long time since I visited the tutorial section of the INDI web site.

https://www.indilib.org/community/indi-tutorials.html

https://www.indilib.org/developers/dev-howtos.html

I was convinced that I had seen more tutorials there on weather station integration, but can't find them now. If I find any, I'll report back here.

[fozzybear]

is this what you are looking for or am i barking up the wrong tree

https://www.indilib.org/weather/weather-meta.html

 

[fozzybear]

1 hour ago, fozzybear said:

is this what you are looking for or am i barking up the wrong tree

https://www.indilib.org/weather/weather-meta.html

 

thanks @wimvb

[wimvb]

@fozzybear do you know how accurate the data from that service is? If you want to use the data to control the obsy, it needs to be fresh and accurate. Or would one upload data from a home weather station to the weather service, and read that back? The advantage of such a scenario is that it becomes easy to test functionality, and that there is redundancy. The data can come from other sources should the private weather station decide to quit working.

[fozzybear]

Here in France it is normally ok as they have local stations to report back as we have water towers with 3/4/5g  aloft plus weather stations info for Meteo.fr and others

https://www.wunderground.com/weather/ISAINT1516

Edited October 26, 2021 by fozzybear

[fozzybear]

5 minutes ago, fozzybear said:

Here in France it is normally ok as they have local stations to report back as we have water towers with 3/4/5g  aloft plus weather stations info for Meteo.fr and others

https://www.wunderground.com/weather/ISAINT1516

this is for my  village

[tomato]

Using weather data from an on-line source is an interesting idea, but I also wonder how reliable it would be if it is not gathering data very local to the observatory site?

For example, two nights ago 70% of the sky was clear on my all sky camera, but rain was lashing down and the rain sensor   closed the shutter on the dome. 

[AstroMuni]

10 hours ago, fozzybear said:

Here in France it is normally ok as they have local stations to report back as we have water towers with 3/4/5g  aloft plus weather stations info for Meteo.fr and others

https://www.wunderground.com/weather/ISAINT1516

How do I configure weather-meta to use data from this? Is it just a matter of putting the URL in?

[fozzybear]

7 hours ago, AstroMuni said:

How do I configure weather-meta to use data from this? Is it just a matter of putting the URL in?

I normally use the data on my Pc but will have a play around with it on my Rpi with Kstars and see how it is done as the instructions on indilib are a bit vague

[fozzybear]

just had a read on indilib forum and apparantly their free service has been suspended so unable to download data maybe look at OpenWeatherMap

A guote on Indilib Forum

The old free/public API used by the driver was removed by Wunderground some time ago and no one has had interest to make it work with the private/paid one. I personally moved to OpenWeatherMap after implementing the driver in INDI.

[AstroMuni]

2 hours ago, fozzybear said:

I normally use the data on my Pc

How do you do that. I think some of the weather drivers can pick up from files as well.

[fozzybear]

your best bet is OpenweatherMap I only use the website so not actually downloading data just a heads up on the local weather forecast. For me i dont have a dome or exterior setup i take my scope and mount out by hand. Sorry if i have confused the situation. It is just what I have read on the Indi forum as my scope is controlled by astroberry and dabbled with stellarmate as well So weather integration is not one of my needs only if it is going to be a good night or not.

 

[AstroMuni]

2 hours ago, fozzybear said:

For me i dont have a dome or exterior setup i take my scope and mount out by hand.

Same here. My laptop is inside the house and connected to the RPi outside that connects to the scope etc. I have to be outside to setup, PA, focus etc and then I can get inside to get the scheduler to capture my sequences. Its only on those dicey days when clouds come and go is the need for some warning so I dont have to keep watching the night skies 🙂 As we get very few days without clouds in my part of the world (and a lot of the time the clear days are midweek when I need to get ready for work the next day), its critical to make full use of the available opportunities.

[AstroMuni]

I found an easier way to get weather info into ekos. I am using the openweathermap driver and all it needs is the api-key which you can get by registering on openweathermap site. Couldnt find any documentation on this so here is a screenshot for others who are interested.

You can set limits for several parameters like weather, temp, rain, cloud % in the Parameters tab. You can only see a part of my screen below showing the weather bit but the rest are below that.