I'm working on adding an AS3935 lightning sensor to my Davis VP2 station setup as an external sensor. My weewx driver is a customized socket server driver, so I'm able to inject this lightning data to the socket so the driver picks it up right away with the LOOP.
I've read matthew's service for this sensor <https://github.com/weewx/weewx/wiki/as3935>, but I don't think that it applies to my setup since I'm not hooking the AS3935 to a Raspberry Pi GPIO. I've extended my schema to have "lightning_distance" in the archive table. I was hoping that yielding a key of "lightning_distance" to the LOOP packet (e.g. packet["lightning_distance"]), that it would be stored in the loop and sent to the archive on REC. This seems to not be the case - which I kind-of expected. A custom service could be challenging since this data would be delivered directly to the driver. So my question; is it possible to have my driver yield custom variables to the LOOP so it can be processed - or do I have to do a custom service? Or can the driver send the data to a custom service? Looking for some thoughts and insight on best practice. Thanks!
