Questions before I buy
I am considering buying a Rainmachine.
Can the controller be programmed and controlled through my local ethernet network or can it only be done through the sever on the Internet?
If Internet Connectivity is lost and no weather data is available will the controller revert to a fixed interval schedule?
Can a local Davis weather station be used as a source for weather data?
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The RainMachine Pro does provide an Ethernet jack.
You can then access your unit locally through the app or via web interface by typing in the local ip address of the unit into the browser.
In case of lost of internet the unit would finish out the 7 day forecast and then resort to a 10 year historical backup and still water within season.
Brandon
RainMachine Support -
I'm really close to making a decision to buy a RainMachine and give it a try.
The one thing holding me back is the ease of integrating my Davis VP2+ weather station to the RainMachine. I have an IP Data Logger which uploads the data to WeatherLink.com and it also is available on the local network thru TCP port 22222. Local access through the IP Data Logger is possible using the Davis SerialProtocol which was released 5 years ago. Access to the WeatherLink.com data base is possible using the Davis API.
This is something that Rainmachine needs to make a priority. There are many thousands of Davis weather stations out there. Most of your users do not have the technical skills and/or the desire to write their own code to make this happen.
What are RainMachine's plan to make it easy to integrate Davis weather stations?
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Building a weather parser for WeatherLink.com shouldn't be difficult but we don't actually own a Davis weather station at this moment to develop this ourselves.
Also in the next update for RainMachine (and available in beta version) we have added an API call that can push weather data to RainMachine (POST /parser/data) maybe you can use this for direct integration without the need of going to WeatherLink.com ?
But if your station is also listed on Wunderground.com you can access it using the Wunderground weather service.
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What I would like to see is the capability for RainMachine to capture data directly from a Davis weather station as the primary source of local current weather and then use an Internet source for forecasting and historical data.
I have a proposal for you to help make this happen. I will send you an email through your Contact Page.
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Weatherlink uses standard format in response: http://www.weather.gov/view/current_observation.xsd
https://www.weatherlink.com/static/docs/APIdocumentation.pdf
You can get it either in XML or JSON and then write a custom parser. I would think RM devs could do this very easily... I can confirm that the API call works...
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