Getting weather information Help with new project

General
1

Yes, this may be well covered in people's projects, but I think this is not quite what they are.

Yes a forecast is nice to get. (That's future project - maybe)

What I need to get is something that tells me the weather NOW, at location x.

So if it is raining; clear; overcast; and so on.

I get this will require parsing a web page, or something like that.

I've done a bit of a quick look, but am asking for help.
(Disclaimer: I am about to buzz off for 2 weeks and this happening has prompted me to get this working.)

I water plants semi-automatically now. But I turn on the power, press the button and actually instigate the watering.

The water is a limited reserve, so it needs to be careful on when it waters. Therefore if it is raining: it will skip that day's watering.

The bigger idea is that it will look at the weather a few minutes before it is due to water.
If it is raining, it will skip that day.
If it isn't, it will water for that day.

But I need a good place from where to get the conditions, and parse the page to get the required data.

So, although it is 11 o'clock now, this will be needed in the future as well.
I may as well get things started rather than waiting until I get back and am catching up on what I missed and also needing to get ready for the next event away.

I'm guessing it should be easy: I get a site, parse it and take action on that. If I get a quick reply, I may even get it working today for this trip away.

Thanks in advance.

Oh, for the sake of picking one I chose:
This site

2

I have found this example to show how to do what I want, and it is helpful to some point.

How to get from a page.

But alas that is .... a better laid out page.

Particular note to this picture:

2024Ă—1416 322 KB

You can clearly see the span.node-red-latest-version there.

On the page I am trying all I see is:

Screenshot from 2020-10-11 11-46-03
Screenshot from 2020-10-11 11-46-031360Ă—768 144 KB

And I don't think that will translate to anything useful.

3

Maybe not. There are plenty of weather API's that you can use that return data in JSON. There was a thread a while back where I posted a comparison table of a number of API's including some that give good current conditions.

https://developer.accuweather.com/

1 Like
4

Just be aware that the data is often quite inaccurate, especially for Australia (assuming you are wanting Oz data).

You can take a different approach and interrogate the BOM website via ftp. It is a bit messy but it does work.

5

Well, the idea is (for now) to get data that indicates how much rain has fallen recently.
(Say last 12 hours)

The future has a whole other thing to do.

So sticking to this, all I need is amount of rain in the past 12 hours here.

6

Well, as rainfall varies considerably over small distances anyway any data will probably be better than none. Maybe one day you can get yourself a weather station, and hook that into NR. Then you can get all the weather from out you back door :smile:

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