[PROJECT] Driver for Ambient API/Local and Ecowitt

Posted 0.6 with the following changes:

  1. More variables are converted to metric as needed.
  2. Changed the description for the MAC to indicate the format.
  3. Added a "Show All Preferences" toggle (something I will likely do in more of my drivers to make the pages look cleaner). One note about this one, since the boolean would be false for people that already have the driver you will likely only see it until you Save Preferences again to "Show All". I wish there was more formatting capabilities (color, font size, bold, etc...) for preferences but this is a start.

I have not been able to get the import feature to work from your website. I’m not sure why. the title tab just says “undefined” and it never imports anything.

I am not sure why it does not work either. You can copy the Import URL into a browser and get to the file directly... It seems very odd as they are completely accessible. Heck, it is checking the versions file for updates in that same location and anyone can open the locations in a browser then download or copy/paste the code. It does not look any different from other driver imports I have seen other than I do not use GitHub. I even wondered if it was because HTTPS vs HTTP, but that did not matter.

If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

0.5 has been working great. I have yet to try 0.6, but I may wait for 0.7
I was just changing over my weather dashboards and I'm missing two attributes I had with the previous Ambient Weather Driver. Could you please add "Feels Like" and "Dew Point"?

Otherwise, this is really quite a good driver. Nicely done!

"feelsLike" and "dewPoint" are already included in the driver.

So... your question leads to two questions of my own:

  1. Do you mean there are Hubitat "Feels Like" and "Dew Point" attributes that could be set (similar to how they have "windSpeed" and "windDirection") but they are not mentioned in the documentation?
  2. These are your preferred names for those values?

I’m guessing @patrick might be the guy to ask about why the import isn’t working.

Are they included in 0.6? As I mentioned I'm currently running 0.5 (will upgrade soon).
Here's all I have available right now when I try to add one of those attributes from the dashboard.

If I disable your driver and re-enable the driver that Thomas C Howard created, then here's the list of available attributes in the dashboard to select from.

feelsLike and dewPoint have been in since version 0.1. I have had them as separate attributes on my Weather Dashboard since my initial work:
image
The only thing that has changed about them since then was metric conversions in v0.4.

So 2 questions:

  1. You do not see them listed in the State Variables or Current State lists on the device page either?
  2. Are you using imperial or metric measurements? Mine are all imperial, but I did put plenty of code to convert to metric for many variables.

This is what I see from my entire listing (Current State)...

dewPoint and feelsLike are calculated by the Ambient system... You mentioned you do not have a "temperature" listing because your temp sensor went bad, right?

What does Thomas' driver show for your temperature value in that case?

One last (other) option, could you set your Ambient (with my driver) to debug, do a refresh, and show the log that has all the attributes in the array? Mine looks like this (excluding the MAC address field):

Away today. Will look into this tonight. I understand your points. I don’t know the answer right now.

Yes, main Temp/Humidity sensor is faulty and not powered on. Possible replacement coming in the next week or so.

Maybe I can change the temperature boolean (inside/outside) be a dropdown list so someone could select any temp sensor they have. Something to think on...

Anyways, let me know because I obviously want this working for everyone. Not much point if there are caveats so it is not useful.

Yeah it's not there. I see what you're saying about the reason. The "dew point" and "feels like" are calculated from the outdoor temperature/humidity sensor currently, but since mine went to device heaven, and I'm not using the add-on sensor, there's nothing to calculate it from because temp1/humidity1 is not valid for those calculations.

Yes, that would be ideal to allow choosing which sensor substitutes for the regular outdoor temp/humidity sensor. I'm the only one encountering this issue now, but in the future I'm sure other people will have a similar issue with replacement sensors.

I'm surprised mine went so fast. Typically it's exposure to salt air that makes them go quickly. My father's Davis temp sensor only lasts between 6 months to a year. They're just a mile from the ocean. That's the primary reason we're changing his temp/humidity readings to a less expensive Ambient Weather temp/humidity sensor he can easily change out from the ground, rather than having to climb up on the roof. We're going to pull the Davis readings in for wind and rain data, and combine it on a Hubitat Dashboard with the Ambient Weather temp/humidity data.

In regard to metric vs imperial, I would really like to see as much flexibility here as you can manage. Canada used to use the imperial system until they changed in 1970. However, not everything changed due to trade with the US. Plus, there's a few generations still alive that remember and prefer some measurements in imperial/US. This is further complicated on a personal level with the fact that I'm an American.

I had to give up on Fahrenheit for outdoor measurements, because I found in the first year living here (I lived here 20 year now) that I couldn't figure out what they were talking about on the news, and bank signs (although some used to show both) would show the temp in Celsius. Converting in my head got old fast. Yep, if you're really young, you'll be saying to yourself, "Bank signs"? What the heck's that old man talking about? For the kids, that's how us old folk used to find out the outdoor temperature when we were driving in our cars. We didn't have a cell phone that could tell us, and we didn't have the outdoor temperature on our dashboards unless we were driving something fancy like a Cadillac

I still like the indoor to be Fahrenheit. It's a finer scale for indoor temp adjustments, so my HE hub is set to ˚F. For wind I use Kilometers per hour, and for rain I use Millimeters. But for barometric pressure, I still prefer inches of mercury. Never could get my head around Millibars and Kilopascals.

OK. No promises, but I can look into calculating feelsLike and dew Point as "hidden" features if they are not provided otherwise.

Imperial VS Metric... It would be tough to allow a mix of units... But I get what you mean. Maybe I can make a "unit map" in the future that will allow customized use.

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Whatever you can reasonably do is appreciated. If the Ecowitt WH32 outdoor temp/humidity sensors turns out to work with my WS-0900-IP station, the same as the Ambient Weather WH32E does (or even works at all for that matter), then it's less of an issue for me. But for others and possible for myself in the future, it would be a great tool to have available.

I do not know the app development at all yet, have not even looked at it, but I wonder if an app could "easily" consolidate multiple weather "devices" and let people pick and choose what they want and how they represent it.

Anyways... I will try to work some adjustments in the next couple evenings. Maybe they will help.

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General request: If someone has an Ambient Weather device in the EU, or a predominantly Metric environment, could you send me a debug sample like I showed above a ways? I want to make sure from a REAL source (not messing with my own) what gets reported.

Thanks in advance!

If it helps I can set my system to all metric and forward the output later this evening.

Ambient Weather doesn't sell outside the US. Only Amazon.com does. They're instead branded Aercus Instruments and Waldbeck Halley. All of them are the same Fine Offset brand units, but with custom firmware on the Observer IP bridge. None of them will upload to Ambient Weather without paying a substantial fee and using something like Metobridge.

OK. That is what I was wondering about with the way their API is structured (US-centric) as opposed to other APIs I have dealt with that usually start with Metric (to be more scientific).

I can flip my own over. I was just wondering if that would "fudge" the results any because I did not know they were US only. Thanks for the offer though!

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It looks like v0.7 will include calculating dewPoint if it is not reported (but requires tempf and humidityout at this time) as well as calculating Heat Index and Wind Chill. Still looking for a reasonable calculation for "Feels Like" although there are MANY conflicting opinions on that one apparently.

Ambient's API notes that feelsLike is "if < 50ºF => Wind Chill, if > 68ºF => Heat Index" so I guess I could "cheat" and copy those over in such scenarios...

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