tl;dr What's the best way of getting home brew wireless sensor data into weewx?
I plan to build a soil moisture (and temperature) sensor for my garden bed. I'll likely build another for leaf wetness and UV index, because the sensors are cheap and it will be fun. The question is how best to get this data to weewx. I am already using the SDR driver for my Acurite 5-in-1 and additional sensors. I could use a 433MHz transmitter. I think, though, I'd have to decide on how to make a packet, then modify rtl_433 to recognize that packet, then modify SDR.py to use that new rtl_433 packet. This seems pretty complicated. Or, since these sensors will be within range of wifi, I could use an ESP2866. This is attractive because the microcontroller for reading the sensor and processing the data is in the same package. I really like this idea. But how do I get the data to weewx? Because the sensor will be running on batteries (and maybe solar cells for the UV/leaf wetness one), I do not want to turn on the wifi radio except when absolutely necessary, so weewx will not be able to initiate contact. My first thought was to use ftp, so the sensor connects to an FTP server on my network, probably on the RPi running weewx, and dumps a file. Then I could write a service within weewx to check for that file, read it, and add the data to the LOOP packet. But I was reading through old discussions here, and I found one using MQTT as a source for weewx. There was no resolution reached, other than some references to weeRT that I didn't really understand (and weeRT is a lot harder to Google than weewx). MQTT is attractive because it's a standard, and other things could subscribe to the sensor data (like a home automation program, or something that will turn on the water to the garden bed). I'd rather not start from scratch with the regular sensors; I'd like to keep using the sdr driver. Is there some really obvious solution that I'm missing? Is there code someone for producing Acurite-like radio packets so my sensors could just pretend to be a tower sensor or something? (I was concerned about getting accurate numbers from a soil moisture sensor, because all my reading says it depends on soil type, and it needs to be calibrated, etc., but Davis doesn't do any of that calibration, and if just using relative moisture is good enough for them, it's good enough for me.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
