WeatherFlow Direct Integration
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RainMachine can you work to code a Direct Integration to WeatherFlow Tempest?
Link to my WeatherFlow Tempest System
Link to WeatherFlow Tempest Website
Link to the Kickstarter for WeatherFlow Tempest
The has been some discussion and requests/questions about this in their Community Forum and Facebook Group
Right now I have to go through WUnderground to link to the RainMachine, Direct link would be much better
Thanks!
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The new Tempest systems have been shipping!!
I see there is a custom developed parser on GitHub that uses UDP for local connection to the WeatherFlow system. The RainMachine Weather Engine support website seems to suggest there may also be another integration method.
⦾ Weather Flow
"The Weather Flow weather service allows RainMachine to integrate with WeatherFlow personal weather stations."
Is there a different method available? Can only seem to find this custom/developer UDP method on GitHub.
Thanks
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"Timing is everything".... I'm currently finishing testing an updated ver of the WF Parser to work with either the new Tempest or Air+Sky. The new Tempest uses a different UPD message structure. Still testing, but here is link to my current code branch which has not yet been merged with the main code; seems to be working well. You're certainly welcome to give it a test and advise of any issues you find.
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Timing is everything, indeed! Thanks for sharing your update. I took a stab at updating the WF parser to account for the new structure Tempest broadcasts UDP data in. I was getting clean data into RainMachine but having problems with the handing of reseting at the turn of each day. I just loaded yours up and I'll report back any issues I see. Again, many thanks!
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I have a neighbor that has the WeatherFlow tempest and I wanted to use his weather station as data input to my rain machine. Can I add his station like I would a wunderground station or Is it closed off to just him? I can see his weather station webpage and data. I cannot figure out how to add the parser to my rain machine and then pull the data off his webpage.
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The WeatherFlow parser listens to UDP broadcasts from the WeatherFlow hub on the local network. Unless you're on the same network (i.e. connected to the same router that the neighbor's hub is connected to), the weatherflow parser won't work. I found the parser to be unreliable, anyways. There are issues with the run frequency and the way that WeatherFlow hub is broadcasting observation data. I run Weewx on a rasberry pi locally and use the RainMachine plugin for Weewx to push data directly to the RainMachine device via the local API. There is an easier cloud-based solution, though:
If your neighbor is reporting is Tempest data to WeatherUnderground, you could pull his weather data into RainMachine using the WeatherUnderground parser. You'd need to ensure the neighbor is (1) reporting data to Wunderground and (2) you'd need an API key. If they're reporting data, they can get an API key.
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Hi Brent,
There was an issue with the parser resulting from the TEMPEST intermittently sending invalid data causing the parser to stop - that has now been fixed (not uploaded yet); added error checking to the parser to ignore the invalid data. What is the run frequency issue? (So I can fix it.) The run freq is currently set to 10min so that it has higher likelihood of capturing rainfall. Unfortunately, the accumulated rainfall does not persist in the Tempest or hub. If the power goes out during a storm, the system won't record the rainfall. The rainfall is currently only recorded when the parser runs. If system looses power before the parser runs, the rainfall data is lost. I'm about to change that and record the rainfall in the database every 10min (if rainfall > 0), and change the parser interval to 3 or 4 hrs (the Wunderground parser runs every 6hrs). BTW, if you lose either power or internet connection during the storm you'll also miss that rainfall data being recorded on Wunderground.
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It would be nice to have native RainMachine integration with the Tempest weather station (Similar to what Rachio has done). I installed the community edition and had a ton of problems with my system losing data and running for up to 4 times longer than it should have (very expensive water bill). The nice thing about RainMachine and Tempest is they don't require cloud connectivity unlike similar products.
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@DD I had the same issue over the summer. The EvapoTranspiration values were ~10x higher when I had the Weather Flow integration runnning. Like you I had a huge water bill.
I spoke Rain Machine customer support team, but they pointed to the fact that I have a custom integration running. They are correct that when I turned off the Rain Machine integration, the issue went away.
I've also emailed the integrations author, Bob, with some details on the problem. He was kind enough to write back, and confirm that the integration doesn't calculate EvapoTranspiration, but it simply reports weather data over to the Rain Machine. He also noted that someone else has changed the integration code since he last worked on it three years ago.
Perhaps a units bug has creapt it's way into the system. I'll keep digging!
It would be really great if the Rain Machine team could help us.
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@Hunter Fontenot I guess at least I'm not the only person that has experienced this costly community integration. Given this request for direct integration has been going on for a few years, it would have been nice if RainMachine would take the hard work Bob did and make any necessary changes to make the code officially supported. For now I have connected my Tempest to Weather Underground and Weather Underground to RainMachine (even though the two devices sit on the same network and I think this is stupid).
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