Weather station with Meteotemplate and WeeWx
This is how I updated my weather station with Raspberry Pi, the template Meteotemplate and open source software WeeWx
I have a weather station Davis Vantage Pro2 I've been using it for quite a few years (at least 10) and the truth is that I've neglected it quite a lot; it's a real shame because it's a good station but I haven't taken much advantage of it.
For several years it had stopped working at night, due to a problem with its solar power supply, which I just fixed a few days ago, and it was isolated from the world (no connection with my home automation system and without publishing data on the internet).
I have recently decided to put it to use again, contributing the data it generates to the community (publishing it on sites such as WeatherUnderground y Meteoclimatic) and publish them on my website. I have solved the problem of it not working at night (by replacing a super capacitor) and giving it a little cleaning.
Weather station hardware
Years ago I used to use Windows software that ran permanently on a PC, connected to the console via a serial port, which saved data and generated a series of web pages that I uploaded, every few minutes, to an external server for viewing on the internet.
In this new reincarnation of the weather station, although I still have several PCs at home running 24×7, I have decided to use one of the existing modern programs that run on a Raspberry PI. This allows me to make the system completely independent and ensures that the data is stored and uploaded to the internet permanently and without any interruption.
New WeeWx software
The first task was to look for the software, and after a lot of reading about the different programs and seeing other stations using them, I decided on WeeWx. This program, written in Phyton, has a number of advantages that make it ideal:
- It is very light and requires very few server resources.
- It has a system of "skins" that allow you to change its graphic appearance easily.
- Support my weather station directly
- Upload the data to the sites I am interested in (Weather Underground, Meteoeoclimatic and, of course, my web server).
- It has implemented a system of plugins that allow it to be extended with new functionalities.
New Raspberry Pi hardware
That said and done, I have taken the oldest raspberry I had at home, as it needs very little power (a Raspberry 1 Model with only 512Mb of memory), and I have prepared a new SD card with the latest version of raspbian.
After a little while of configuration, it was up and running and uploading data to my website: https://emariete.com/estacion-meteorologica-madrid-espana/
As icing on the cake I have installed a fantastic template, called meteotemplate, and this is the result: https://emariete.com/estacion-meteorologica-madrid-espana/
I am very satisfied with the result. I hope that the operation will be stable and will run as long as possible without interruption. A few years of uninterrupted operation would be nice.