How to integrate pywws with various weather services

This guide gives brief instructions on how to use pywws with some other weather services and software. It is not comprehensive, and some services (such as Twitter) are covered in more detail elsewhere.

YoWindow

YoWindow is a weather display widget that can display data from an internet source, or from your weather station. To display data from your station pywws needs to write to a local file, typically every 48 seconds when new data is received. This is easy to do:

  1. Stop all pywws software

  2. Copy the yowindow.xml example template to your text template directory.

  3. If you haven’t already done so, edit weather.ini and set the local_files entry in the [paths] section to a suitable directory for your yowindow file.

  4. Add the yowindow template to the [live] tasks in weather.ini. Set its flags to 'L' so the result is copied to your local directory instead of being uploaded to an ftp site:

    [live]
    text = [('yowindow.xml', 'L')]
    
  5. Restart pywws live logging.

You can check the file is being updated every 48 seconds by using more or cat to dump it to the screen.

Finally configure yowindow to use this file. See http://yowindow.com/pws_setup.php for instructions on how to do this.

Twitter

See How to configure pywws to post messages to Twitter for full instructions.

Other “services”

The remaining weather service uploads are handled by the pywws.toservice module. See the module’s documentation for general configuration options. The following subsections give further information about some of the available services.

Citizen Weather Observer Program

New in version 14.02.dev1156.

Note that the latitude and longitude must be in “LORAN” format and leading zeros are required. See question 3 in the CWOP FAQ for more information.

Licensed radio hams use their callsign as the designator and need a passcode. They should use the service name cwop_ham instead of cwop when running pywws.toservice directly and in the weather.ini services entries. (The same [cwop] config section is used for both.)

CWOP uploads are rate-limited by pywws, so you can safely add it to both the [live] and [logged] sections in weather.ini.

The CWOP/APRS uploader is based on code by Marco Trevisan <mail@3v1n0.net>.

Open Weather Map

The default behaviour is to use your user name to identify the weather station. However, it’s possible for a user to have more than one weather station, so there is an undocumented name parameter in the API that can be used to identify the station. This appears as id in weather.ini. Make sure you don’t choose a name that is already in use.

PWS Weather

temperatur.nu

Weather Underground

Weather Underground “RapidFire” updates

Weather Underground has a second upload URL for real time updates as little as 2.5 seconds apart. If you run pywws in ‘live logging’ mode (see How to set up ‘live’ logging with pywws) you can use this to send updates every 48 seconds, by adding ‘underground_rf’ to the [live] tasks section in weather.ini:

[live]
services = ['underground_rf']

[logged]
services = ['underground']

Make sure you still have an ‘underground’ service in [logged] or [hourly]. This will ensure that ‘catchup’ records are sent to fill in any gaps if your station goes offline for some reason.

wetter.com


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