I’ve now got an Ecowitt Wittboy installed high on the moors about 80 miles away from my home and it’s uploading data to the Ecowitt service. That leads to a big question, how to let everyone see the station data?
The options seem to be…
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Use the Ecowitt.net web site. This seems to be a non-starter because it looks like you can only see the data if you register?
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Use either CumulusMX or WD at my home to download the data from the Ecowitt API. This would work although requires another Raspberry Pi which I don’t have at the moment. It also adds another hop for the data (station to Ecowitt to Pi to web site) so might make it less reliable.
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Do (2) but buy a Pi to install next to the station. This might also mean I could capture the date locally without it needing to be uploaded to Ecowitt. Downside is another (rare) Pi is needed plus it’s more remote electronics that isn’t easy to maintain/support if needed.
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I think Meteotemplate has a plug-in that can read Ecowitt API data but I’ve not looked in detail to see if it’s current/supported.
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I could use PWS Dashboard with the custom upload functionality but the GW2000 isn’t configured to do that at the moment. I don’t think that can be configured remotely and I probably won’t have access to locally configure the gateway for 3 months.
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I think the next release of PWS Dashboard will support the Ecowitt API, but that’s not available until Wim has finished his development and testing work.
Are there any options I’ve missed, particularly options that I can get working quickly and without trying to track down a Raspberry Pi that may be as rare as rocking horse droppings!
Hi,
Point 1: Ecowitt.net
You define a share-URL so that other visitors can see your data.
See attached screenshot.
Points 5 and 6: PWS_Dashboard
API-station-weather-data from WU and others is almost always 5 minute data.
AFAIK Ecowitt returns 5 minute data also.
Even if you read it every minute from the servers, the values only change every 5 mintues.
A station-upload to the webserver (Ecowitt => CustomUpload) gives the best results as it is faster, no “in-between” changes by the API-server.
I assume your Ecowitt Wittboy is not uploading to WU ?
The current PWS_Dashboard release needs for
= > weather-data either the WU-API or the Ecowitt CustomUpload.
= > the data graphs either WU-api or a cron-job to save the weather-data.
The Beta release can also use Ecowitt-API for the weather-data.
But the graphs are only tested with WU-API data and not available yet for the “cron”-data.
Succes,
Wim
Thanks for all the info.
I’d come across that whilst looking through the app but it looked it was for sharing API data rather than a web link. Having now created a share I see that it produces a web link that can be shared. This will probably get me past the initial problem of allowing a couple of key people to see the data until I can get something more permanent set up.
I saw some comments elsewhere suggesting that historic data from the Ecowitt API is only every 5 minutes, but current data is every minute. Even 5 minute data would be better than nothing for now though!
It’s currently only uploading to Ecowitt. I only had a very short window of time today to get it set up so haven’t had the opportunity to configure anything other than the basics. For now it’s just the automatic Ecowitt upload. Unfortunately I’ve no way to remotely access the GW2000 and with guests in the house pretty much 7 days a week from now until the end of the summer season my next opportunity to configure anything will be when we have our family weekend there at the end of July. So I’m looking for a way to try to get the data onto a website until I can do some reconfiguration.
Understood, but as that needs a config change on the gateway it’s not something I can do in the short term.
I’m a few months early. Maybe you’ll have released the new version by the time I can get to the gateway to reconfigure it. It would definitely be best to only have two ‘moving parts’, i.e. the gateway and some web software.
On thing to bare in mind longer term, the Ecowitt gateways do not buffer data, so if your internet connection is down for any length of time there will be a corresponding gap in the data on ecowitt.net.
A local device that bridges that gap by logging locally would be required to prevent that.
Thanks for reminding me!
I’ve had this discussion before and had started to plan for it but with the long delay in getting the station installed I’d forgotten. I’ve got a couple of non-Pi SBCs that I was considering using. There’s one sat hidden under my desk running CumulusMX just to check if it ran OK…which it does. I’ve just pulled the second one out and upgraded it. It’s got a 6 core Arm Cortex-53 running at 1.8GHz with 4GB RAM and a 128GB NVME2 drive attached. Overkill for the job really but they’re sitting doing nothing at the moment.
So my plan for the evening is now…
- Install CMX onto the currently unused SBC
- Configure CMX to grab data from Ecowitt API
- Set up a PWS Dashboard site
- Configure CMX to push data to PWSD
If I manage all of that this evening I’ll be surprised, but at least it’s something to keep me busy!
I appear to have misunderstood things.
It appears that CumulusMX only reads data from the EcoWitt API to backfill missing historic data and needs a local connection to get real-time/live data.
So I’m back to square 1 again with no way to get the data I want from the station 
Time to go to rest my brain.
