First, let me say thank you to Wim for this very cool and easy to use software. I’m a newb to pws but not to php and web hosting. It was probably a slight breach of the rules to install the software while Wim is on vacation, but thanks to an earlier post I was able to get my hands on a fairly new copy (but not the latest). I was able to get my weather site set up and running in basically one evening. Everything is displaying and updating satisfactorily, with one exception: Wind data (and virtually everything else) only refreshes every 3 to 4 minutes or so. I can see in the php code that wind should be updating every 40 seconds, but it isn’t.
I must be overlooking something, but it isn’t in the settings pages, and it’s not because my cron job is too infrequent – I have PWS_cron_stationcron.php running once every minute. I don’t really understand how the refresh rate is governed. Any enlightenment would be appreciated.
Your website uses data from Ambient.net, which is “only” available in 5 minute intervals.
It is downloaded every 2 minutes. Setting that to a higher frequency will not help either, the Ambient data will remain in 5 minute intervals.
Hope this helps for now.
If your weatherstation is a rebranded Ecowitt station, you could install a Ecowitt GW1100 with the correct frequency and that device can upload every minute or even faster.
Thank you for your help. I guess I don’t understand what you mean by ambient data is only available in 5 minute intervals? I can see that ambient.txt updates every 2 minutes and the data it contains (at least the ones I care about) are new with each update. After paying close attention to the refreshes on the website, it seems to update data from ambient.txt every 2 minutes, about 40 seconds after the file is updated. Looks like I’ll have to live with the limitations of my hardware for now.
Speaking of which, I don’t really know how to tell if my hardware is rebranded? It shipped in a box with the AmbientWeather logo on it. I don’t have any reason to believe it’s Ecowitt. If it was, I would give it a shot; doesn’t look too expensive.
Ecowitt and Ambient use the same manufacturing source for their equipment. Some of it is cross compatible, some is not. It would not be accurate to call one or the other ‘re-branded.’ I have the Ambient WS-2000 array and panel but use an Ecowitt GW-1000 to read the data for the purpose of my website and for WD. I don’t see any point to sending the data acrross the internet and then waiting for it to return via the internet for WD. WD simply reads the data directly from the GW1000. So too the website gets its data uploaded every 30 seconds from the GW1000 without multiple trips back and forth.
The lightning detector and extra temp sensors are cross-compatible, the AQI sensor is not. So the AQI sensor shows up in WD and the webpage, but not the Ambient panel. My live yard cam is Ambient and it uploads to Ambient and i download the stills from Ambiient and use WD’s movie maker to make the movies on the web page.
Having said all that I still notice that one system or the other will miss a peak gust of wind.
Regards,
Jim
Edit: P.S. The 5 minute interval is correct when downloading history from Ambient (i.e. WD doesn’t run 24/7) but is one minute intervals when downloading missed data from Ecowitt. The question isn’t really the interval, but whether the data shows the peaks achieved during the interval. With respect to wind, i don’t think it does.