Raspberry Pi Weather Station

This repository is for recording and visualizing data from a Switchdoc Labs WeatherSense weather station, which includes two sensor units:

• FT020T (outdoor) sensor, which includes Temperature, Humidity, Windspeed, Rainfall, and Sunlight
• F016TH (indoor) sensor, for Temperature and Humidity

The sensors transmit in the ISM radio band, so a radio receiver is required (in this case, a USB module + antenna) attached to a Raspberry Pi.

The code in this repository starts 3 services, responsible for:

1. Listening for radio transmissions (and deduplicating)
2. Logging the received data to an InfluxDB database;
3. Running a Grafana dashboard
4. Serving with Nginx

1) SDR Weather Reading service

This service relies on the rtl_433 package, which is responsible for processing the incoming radio transmissions and formatting them into JSON. This will be downloaded and built by the install.sh script. If necessary to configure, rtl_433 will search for configs in these locations:

• rtl_433.conf
• /home/pi/.config/rtl_433/rtl_433.conf
• /usr/local/etc/rtl_433/rtl_433.conf
• /etc/rtl_433/rtl_433.conf

The Python start.py script uses rtl_433 to check the radio reading, then inserts that data into the database. (The database name is set in config.py). To get this code to run on boot, edit the sdr_weather_reading.service file to specify the location of the start.py script. Then, move (or copy) the service file into /etc/systemd/system/, and run commands to enable it as a service:

sudo chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/<name>.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable <name>.service

2) InfluxDB Service

This service runs the time-series database InfluxDB on the Raspberry Pi. As of Jan 2022, version 1.6 will be installed not v2.x, which is substantially different. To run this service (after installing influxDB), the install script runs:

sudo systemctl unmask influxdb
sudo systemctl enable influxdb
sudo systemctl start influxdb

You can check that it's running correctly with systemctl status influxdb.service. Note that the database named in config.py must be manually created for data to be logged correctly.

3) Grafana Service

The Grafana service runs a dashboard connected to the above InfluxDB. Grafana does not appear to be available in the standard Raspbian sources, so a new entry is added to sources.list.d (check linux_install.sh). The install script runs unmask, enable, and start on the service (as with InfluxDB). To check the status, this service is called grafana-server.service

Grafana can be configured within the UI itself. If you forget your password (default is admin) you can reset with grafana-cli admin reset-admin-password <new password>.

4) Nginx Service

Grafana will run on port 3000 by default. You could probably change it, but I think it makes more sense to run nginx, and have it proxy requests. Like other services, install/unmask/enable/start as necessary. The simplest-possible config is in nginx.conf, which should be placed in /etc/nginx.

With the service (and grafana running), entering the IP of your Raspberry Pi into the browser will display the Grafana dashboard.