gopherwx

gopherwx is a service that pulls live weather data from a Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 station and does stuff with it.

Features

• Powers a live weather website with graphs (front-end code available here)
• Stores historical data in InfluxDB for graphing and analysis.
• Sends live weather data to Weather Underground for use as a WU Personal Weather Station (PWS). WU API key required.
• Sends data to APRS/CWOP. Ham radio license or CWOP station registration required.
• Streams live data over gRPC. Roll your own client or try my Linux client.

Quick Start

You will need a few things to use gopherwx:

1. A Davis Instruments VantagePro or VantagePro 2 weather station. This may work with the Vue. I'm not certain.

2. A way to connect your station to a Linux server. There are several options for this:

• A WeatherLink (or clone) serial/USB cable to connect your VantagePro console to your server.
• A Davis Instruments Wireless Weather Envoy. This device has a 900MHz reciever that decodes the transmissions from the VantagePro station and makes them available over TCP/IP.

3. One or more of the following:

• InfluxDB, if you want to have your own weather website like the one I have at mhkweather.com.
• A Weather Underground API account for sending live data to WU. The base account level is free and is sufficient.
• A ham radio license if you want to send live data to APRS-IS
• A CWOP ID if you want to send live data to CWOP
• grpc-weather-bar, if you want to display live weather on your Linux desktop

Installation

The easiest and recommended way to use gopherwx is to use the ready-made Docker image, chrissnell/gopherwx. This image makes use of gosu to drop root privileges to nobody:nobody. I have included an example Docker Compose file and systemd unit file to get you started.

To use Dockerized gopherwx, follow these steps:

1. Drop the systemd unit file gopherwx.service wherever you keep your aftermarket unit files. On my Ubuntu server, that's /etc/systemd/user/.

2. Create a directory for the gopherwx configuration and compose files. I recommend /etc/gopherwx. If you call it something different, be sure to edit the gopherwx.service and docker-compose.yml files to reflect your path. Most folks won't have to edit these.

3. Copy the config.yaml and the docker-compose.yml files from this GitHub repo into your /etc/gopherwx directory.

4. Start gopherwx.service by running this as root: systemctl start gopherwx.service

5. Have a look at gopherwx logs to make sure everything is working correctly: journalctl -u gopherwx -f

6. Make sure that gopherwx.service starts at boot time by running systemctl enable /etc/gopherwx/user/gopherwx.service

Setting up a live weather website

gopherwx doesn't serve a weather website, it only pulls the weather readings from the Davis device and stores them in the InfluxDB database for you to use as you wish. To make a website for your data, you will need a couple of additional components:

• A live weather website. I have provided the source code/HTML for https://mhkweather.com in this repository.

• weather-proxy - Acts a gateway between people on the Internet and your InfluxDB database. Since InfluxDB isn't really suitable for exposing directly to the internet, weather-proxy acts as a middleman, handling requests from your website visitors' browsers and querying InfluxDB to pull the requested weather data. weather-proxy is suitable for exposure to the open Internet.

gRPC Support

gopherwx includes a built-in gRPC server that can serve up a stream of live weather readings to compatible clients. I have written an example client, grpc-weather-bar, that reads live weather from gopherwx over the network and display it within Polybar, a desktop stats bar for Linux.

If you would like to build your own client, have a look at the protobuf spec.