08 February 2013

My weather station project

This page is the documentation for how I set up my weather station with my home made front end for modern HTML5 visualizations. The reason for building my own frontend is simply that I find all the free software for weather displays very lacking in presentation and features. I built my own frontend with goals of being responsive, so both small (mobile) and huge screens would get pretty graphs. All the layout is thus responsive design, with SVG vectorized graphics for the visualizations. There's also some JavaScript to detect screen size and make some adjumestments to the page to get it all to work smoothly on all screen sizes. The frontend is still very much a work in progress, but supports the most critical features of displaying live current weather and different graphs of historic data, with records.

Note: This document is a work in progress and will have a few weak parts until I have worked out a few kinks, etc.

Prequisites

Components

Installation

The guide is a bit terse and written in a style that expects familiarity with linux, and will only list the specifics.

Log in to raspberry PI

Install all the dependencies. Some of these are only extra deps required of weewx if you intend to use its own weather page generation. I believe you can skip cheetah, imaging and pyephem.

sudo apt-get install python-configobj 
sudo apt-get install python-serial
sudo apt-get install python-cheetah 
sudo apt-get install python-imaging 
sudo apt-get install python-psycopg2

sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install pyephem

Install weewx

Find the latest wersion from weewx download page.

wget -O weewx.tar.gz http://sourceforge.net/projects/weewx/files/weewx-2.1.1.tar.gz/download
tar xvfz weewx.tar.gz
cd weewx*
sudo ./setup.py install

Then download my postgresql patch and apply it.

wget http://hveem.no/weewx-2.1.1.postgresql.patch ; patch -p1 < weewx-2.1.1.postgresql.patch

Configure weewx

cd /home/weewx
sudo chown -R pi /home/weewx

Configure weewx to match your needs and wants. I use metric system, and disable every weewx's own generation tools.

vim weewx.conf

We also need our specific database setup for amatyr frontend. Note that my patch for weewx for postgresql is at this point incomplate and only supports the archive database. I am in the process of figuring out the statsdb and getting it to work with postgresql.

[StdArchive]
archive_database = archive_psql
stats_database = stats_psql

[[archive_psql]]
    host = 10.9.36.1
    user = wwex
    password = wwexwwex
    database = weewx
    driver = weedb.postgresql

[[stats_psql]]
    host = 10.9.36.1
    user = weewx
    password = wwexwwex
    database = stats
    driver = weedb.postgresql

You can do additonal davis specific settings with the next command, like setting altimeter, correct date/time, etc. The important part for me is to set the archive interval to 60 seconds to log to database every 60 seconds.

./bin/config_vp.py weewx.conf --help
./bin/config_vp.py weewx.conf --set-interval 60

Configure weewx to start on boot

sudo cp /home/weewx/start_scripts/Debian/weewx /etc/init.d 
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/weewx 
sudo update-rc.d weewx defaults 98 
sudo /etc/init.d/weewx start

Install and configure openvpn server on the web server

apt-get install openvpn
mkdir /etc/openvpn/keys
openvpn --genkey --secret /etc/openvpn/keys/raspberry.key

cat <<EOF >> /etc/openvpn/raspberry.conf
dev tun
ifconfig 10.9.36.1 10.9.36.2
secret keys/raspberry.key
keepalive 1 60
ping-timer-rem
persist-tun
persist-key
comp-lzo
fast-io
EOF

Install and configure openvpn client on the raspberry

sudo apt-get install openvpn
sudo mkdir /etc/openvpn/keys

Transfer the static key from the web server

sudo scp -p web-server-ip:/etc/openvpn/keys/raspberry.key /etc/openvpn/keys/raspberry.key

Set client conf

cat <<EOF >> /etc/openvpn/raspberry.conf
remote web-server-ip
dev tun
ifconfig 10.9.36.2 10.9.36.1
secret keys/raspberry.key
keepalive 1 60
ping-timer-rem
persist-tun
persist-key
comp-lzo
nobind
float
fast-io
EOF

Install postgresql database on the webserver

sudo apt-get install postgresql-server
sudo -u postgresql psql postgres
create user wwex with password 'wwexwwex';
alter role wwex createdb;

Alter posgresql.conf to listen to IP

listen_addresses = '17.0.0.1,10.9.36.1'        # what IP address(es) to listen on;

Alter pga_hba.conf to allow connection for IP

host all   all 10.9.36.2 md5

Start weewx and check that it's logging OK

You should see successful pushes to database in the logfile after you run these commands:

service weewx start
tail -f /var/log/messages

Install AmatYr on the web server

Read its own Readme over at github. Fair warning, project is still in a bit of flux so expect some errors in the doc.

A few pictures of the setup

My dad installing the weather sensore suite

The weather station sensor

The wireless antenna for sending the signal to the internets

The wireless antenna to send the signal back home

The Raspberry PI connected to a wireless repeater, a web camera and the weather station console

The weather station console and raspberry pi

You can visit my own weather site at yr.hveem.no

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