The Weather Underground stations in my area don't have illuminance. I am thinking of buying my own weather station hardware so I can pick up illuminance and wind speed. I can use wind speed to send me a text reminder to close my patio umbrella's if the wind reaches a designated speed, and illuminance to trigger evening mode.
Do you have your own weather station hardware? If so can you recommend what you have?
I believe Andy is using the Solar Radiation and converting that to an illumination number. He might have a suggestion for how to get that with a weatherunderground station near you.
I purchased this one:
The cool feature is that I can register it to WeatherUnderground and it adds to their forecasting fabric. This is great as I'm in a bit of a microclimate. The not-so-cool feature is that it needs to register with WeatherUnderground and thus there is a cloud connection involved with HU.
I would think that in your use-case, you'd want some prediction of wind speed so that you could take care of your umbrella prior to the wind actually launching your umbrella into the neighbors yard. This may connect to using a neighbor's weather station and save you some money there.
Iām in the UK and just bought one for the very same reasons.
Took 10mins to setup and about 30 mins before I was getting good data from WU.
It doesnāt have a console or anything but as I only wanted to get it to report to WU it was perfect for me
Andy
Thanks guys! I will check these out!
Interestinglyā¦
These seem to be identical units 
Andy
@DeveloperDavidB
Iām looking at putting some kind of messaging into WS
Perhaps along with mp3 playingā¦ not sure yet.
I have an ST app (Message Central) which does messaging and mp3ās which Iām porting over to Hubitat. I might just combine the two into one app so it can do messaging and switching.
Andy
@CAL.hub
Iāve been thinking about this and how to do it.
I like interesting problems and if nobody else has done it already, then iāll look at creating an app
Interested in testing it for me?
One thing that Iām not sure about is how to test if you have already watered so if it did rain there is no need for further water.
Andy
Absolutely! Thanks.
If I understand your question, I don't think it's a problem - at least for me. I only have two opportunities to run the irrigation system: Sun or Thu mornings. So, I just have to tell the app (now similarly using a webCoRE piston) to wakeup at 4am on those mornings and check the historical rainfall and forecasted rain. Then, based upon some algorithm, decide whether to run.
It may give you a better idea to look at the conditions I use in my piston:
It's a work-in-progress. It actually uses only the totalRain from yesterday and today. The rainPx variables are my testing code to see how well I can gather and calculate the earlier historical rainfall. I don't yet use them. Sprinkler is just an override variable.
I would expect that the perfect algorithm would provide for user-weighting of the historical rain and future rain and then a binary go/nogo decision.
It's very generous of someone who lives in constant precipitation to implement a sprinkler app.
. Thanks again.
How are you getting forcasted rain?
Andy
Is there an easy way to change what station I am receiving data from? I think I found a local station that has the variables I would need for illuminance. KWABATTL44
My driver says I am currently using KWABATTL64. Sorry, I am new to WU
Depends which driver you are using but you can enter PWS:KWABATTL44 as your zip/post code
Thanks Cobra! I was thinking I needed to generate a new API key or something. Was on WU trying to figure it out. I am using your lower case driver. Thanks for the tip, Its now receiving data from the new station!
I'm not sure I am. FWIW, I fetch this:
$weather.forecast.forecast.simpleforecast.forecastday[1].qpf_allday.in
I haven't tested it long, and with little to no rain it's hard to tell. But I did get a non-zero result a few days ago.
Okā¦
Iāve added two new attributes to the driver Iām working on.
Managed to get them to report in either in or mm
These seem to give me some numbers but Iāll need to keep an eye on them to see if they are anywhere near accurate
Andy
Hi Cobra, Do you think you could add an attribute for Expected wind tomorrow? This would be great for sending a message to remind me to colapse any umbrellas on my patio if wind is expected the next day.
Thanks,
Or maybe Expected Gustās Tomorrow?
@DeveloperDavidB
Unfortunately, it doesnāt seem that WU push that data (or at least I canāt find it)
Andy
Thanks for looking! How about grabbing forcasted gust speed from the weather_summary and saving that as it's own "Forecast_Wind_Gust" attribute? In the below screenshot, the summary says "with gusts up to 5mph". The Wind_Speed, and Wind_Gust attributes are not very useful as triggers because it would be to late by the time they report the high wind speed.
I am just now realizing that the Weather_Summary lists Last Updated on April 27th. Thatās strange because up above in the Observation_Time attribute, it lists today, April 30th. Is the Weather_Summary for the day of the 27th? Is this not updated with the Auto Poll?
I am not getting āWeather_Summaryā at all? I know if was there before (versions ago). But is is not even listed in the āCurrent Statesā for me, even after a Forced Poll. I do not see any errors in the logs.
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