I just wanted to tell you my experiences setting up WeeWX on a Raspberry Pi (RPi) and how pleased I am with it. I recently bought an AcuRite 02032 Pro 5-in-1 Weather Station with PC Connect. I first ran it with PC Connect on my desktop but wanted the weather station up all the time and didn’t want to leave my desktop on every night. I could have bought an AcuRite 09150RM smartHUB but I had a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B that I wasn’t using. I searched and found WeeWX which sounded good.
I bought a 32GB micro SDHC card and a good power supply. On my desktop I downloaded NOOBS to the SDHC card and then installed Raspbian in the RPI. I was up and running with a monitor, mouse, keyboard and short Ethernet patch cable connection to my router. I was somewhat confused reading about wheeze, jessie and stretch but figured out that these were versions of Raspbian. Stretch is the latest. I did several apt-gets to update the latest package versions. I installed WeeWX once I figured out to use “O” instead of “0” in the commands. I edited weewx.conf to use US keyboard and entered station data, enabled station registration and Weather Underground reporting to KCASANLU93 (that I got from the Weather Underground). I then started WeeWX. I ran ifconfig to get the RPi IP address and raspi-config to enable predictable interface names. (I don’t know what that means; I just followed instructions for a lot of this.) Now it was time to convert the RPi to headless operation accessing the RPi user interface from my Windows 10 desktop. I created an empty SSH file which causes Shell to be installed when RPi reboots. Then I changed the DHC config to static IP so RPi’s IP wouldn’t change. I shutdown WeeWX, rebooted the RPi and looked at the SYSLOG to confirm WeeWX was running. I changed the RPi configuration to change the Pi user password and enable SSH. I disconnected the monitor, mouse and keyboard leaving the RPi with only three connections (power, USB to the AcuRite display and an Ethernet to the router. SSH (Beta) is already installed in Windows 10. I used the ssh pi@RPi IP address to remotely log into the RPi. It worked! I didn’t take me long to realize that having just command line access was a drag. It felt cumbersome, like going back to DOS. Time to setup access to RPi’s graphical user interface. On the desktop I installed RealVNC and on the RPi enabled RealVNC VNC in Preferences/Raspberry PI Configuration/Interfaces. In Windows 10 I ran the VNC viewer, connected to the RPi’s IP address and logged in as Pi user. How nice to be back to RPi’s GUI! I also changed RPi’s host name to WeeWX. All this time I had been wondering about the WeeWX reports. Was there a utility to run reports? Finally I realized that the reports were actually html stored in a weewx directory! Time to setup the RPi as a web server. I installed the Apache server and was up and running. In the web browser in Windows 10 I typed in RPi’s IP as an URL and there was the Apache page. Added /weewx to the URL and there was the WeeWX reports! Mystery solved. Now it was time to access WeeWX reports from the Internet. Delving into my TP-Link router I found its WAN (Internet) IP address. In the router I setup a Virtual Server (Port Forwarding) for port 80 (HTTP) to RPi’s IP address. Now using the router’s WAN IP address/weewx I could see the WeeWX reports from the Internet! But then I figured out that the router’s WAN address was a dynamic IP. It could change whenever my Internet provider wanted to. Not wanting to pay business rates for a static IP I bought a private domain name from Dynu ($15/year) along with their DNS service. I now could access my WeeWX reports as sloroyalwx/weewx! Later I found that the TP-Link router has Dynamic DNS support. But only to three DNS services, none of which is Dynu! I don’t know the consequences of not having DNS supported by my router. Guess I’ll find out. During all this I kept looking at weewx.com/stations to see my station. It never showed up! After some consternation and looking at weewx.conf and SYSLOG it finally struck me. The station URL line was commented out by a # at the start of the line. Duh! Got rid of the #, told WeeWX to re-read its config and finally there it was in weewx.com/stations! I got every I wanted to work. There is only one minor glitch, pressure data doesn’t show up on the Weather Underground web page. I can live with that. That’s all. Everything else works! I did read that installing a Real-Time Clock was a good idea but I read confusing instructions so I didn’t do it. Raspbarian accesses Internet Network Time Servers to get current time. The only issue seems to be if after a power failure WeeWX starts before Raspbarian get the current time. This could be avoided by running RPi on an Uninterruptable Power Supply. Building an RPi sized UPS might be an interesting project. Well this was really a learning exercise. I did a lot by rote from instructions but I also learned a lot about the WeeWX, RPi, Rasparian, my router, web sites and networking in general. I could write this report because I kept a log as I went. I’m quite happy with WeeWX and RPi as a server. It’s hard to believe that the RPi has so much capability. Thanks to WeeWX and RPi developers who made it all work. If anybody is interested I can post my log. Just let me know. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
