Get weather data from Davis Weatherlink
Implemented
This is connected to the problems that are having to be solved with WeatherUnderground, and motivated by my pessimistic outlook for WeatherUnderground:
Add support for getting personal weather station data from Davis Weatherlink. Davis weather stations are among the most popular personal weather stations. Their network-connected weather stations can upload their data to Davis Weatherlink (see www.weatherlink.com). I think most Davis weather stations that report to Weather Underground do so via Weatherlink. Wouldn't it be lovely if the RainMachine could get realtime weather information (in particular local rain information!) from the Weatherlink site?
I'll be the first one to point out the obvious difficulty: The Weatherlink site only report the current conditions; it doesn't keep track of history, nor does it have any forecasting. That makes it either difficult for the engineers at RainMachine to use, or less useful. But if Weather Underground croaks on us, it might be better than nothing.
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The local, completely independent solution, should be possible, as far as I remember you can connect with plain TCP/IP to WeatherLinkIP port and get data. I think it did have a hourly/daily precipitation sum, that would be necessary so the RainMachine parser would be run hourly or more.
For the website weatherlink.com I think it's even easier to get data (they had an API that could get you current observations).
Even without forecasting it will still help, as RainMachine has "Forecast Correction" which looks back and computes the delta between forecasted (None) and historical and water accordingly.
P.S. We already have a community member working on local WeatherFlow integration.
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Thanks for the reply! I'll put that on my to-do list to get set up. I like the idea of getting my RainMachine to talk to my weather station directly (on the local network), rather than going out to the external network or a cloud-based service. Not because I mistrust the cloud (far from it) or fear the internet, simply because the local network is faster and more reliable than DSL and friends. And: Happy Independence Day!
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I'm certainly not working it; there are (unfortunately) zillion things of higher priority on my to-do list. Like actually digging holes and putting plants into the flower bed that just got its sprinklers finished last weekend, and putting in pipes and sprinkler heads for the next flower bed. Here on the west coast, I don't expect any rain for about a month, and no significant rain for two months, so trying to save water by turning irrigation off isn't urgent.
I know that reaching the WeatherLinkIP device locally is actually quite easy; I have a very simple python program that opens a socket to it, reads the current status, and prints it in a human-readable format. It does definitely report the total rain per day; I don't see a report of rain per hour, but with a little programming, a daemon could do that (get the rain every hour, calculate the difference from the last reading). -
Please checkout the new updated Weather Services article that includes Davis Station support here: https://support.rainmachine.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011755813-RainMachine-Weather-Engine
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