Just saying hello

[jlfenton65]

I just set up a weather station and noticed WeatherByYou has support for pywws, so I registered so I can try out the pywws template. Crossing my fingers! Looks really nice...

[Mr.Meteo]

Hi jl,

Welcome to this Forum.
I'm not a pywws Geek, but had fun to realize that project!
My pywws station is builded on a Asus RT-N16 routeur and run pretty well!
I was surprised to be able to do that project relatively easily, as I'm a Windows
long time user and had no experience at all on Linux.
I've found funny to do a "live" weather site with so little hardware! 
My next step will be to do a complete website on this router, as Apache,
MySQL and Php, the base to do a complete webserver, are available for
Linux embedded devices! That is why my pywws template (Weather Nature)
was planned to be as light as possible!

I hope you'll have lot of fun too!

Regards,
Jacques

[jlfenton65]

Thanks. All our computers at my place are running linux, and have for almost a decade. I set up pywws on the HTPC I keep in the living room. Everything was fairly easy once I figured out what you are supposed to do. Like a number of things in the linux world, the documentation leaves something to be desired.

The pywws site does the first part right - showing you how to install and setup the software, but then they fail in presenting the next steps. After it is setup, they need to cover weather.ini in detail, then point out that the graphics templates are fed to plot(), then cover plot(). After that, they need to point out that the text templates are covered under the templates heading, and go through that. Finish up the docs with a section on conversions, showing how to handle some of the more common conversions in both the graphics and text templates.

My brother and I got it going in an hour or two. The web-side template was also handy. Now I can take some time, adjust the range on various plots, maybe add a few more templates for specific things, and adjust the look of the page. This forum was helpful in this as I found threads on conversions.

[Mr.Meteo]

Hi,

I'm happy that the site helped you a bit!
I agree that things could always be better for pywws documentation.
... as many others! But a real Linux user is an adventurer! ;-)

If you have some experience to share, don't hesitate to leave a post!

Regards,
Jacques

[jlfenton65]

Well, one thing that we did that might help someone... the general suggestion in the pywws docs is to use cron to run the updates, but all our weather handling is under a user, so a very simple method for XFCE users (we use Xubuntu almost exclusively on our systems) is to open the settings manager, and go to "Session and Startup". Click the "Application Autostart" tab and click the "Add" button at the bottom. Set the Name field to something like "Weather update", the Description field to something like "Run Hourly.py periodically for updates", and set the Command field to "watch -n 600 python /path/to/pywws/Hourly.py -v /path/to/weather/data".

Now go to ~/.config/autostart and you'll find a desktop file called "Weather update.desktop" (depends on the name you gave it above). Open that file in a text editor and change "Terminal=false" to "Terminal=true" and save it. Then log out and log in again. When the user session starts, it will automatically open a terminal and run that watch command. The watch command runs whatever command follows it at the rate specified (in seconds). The terminal allows you to see the results for running Hourly.py. You can leave it on the screen, or minimize it. No need to worry about cron or user/super status or log files... and it automatically starts any time you log in.