NOTICE: The RainMachine product line appears to be dead. I have since migrated to OpenSprinkler and no longer have a RainMachine to develop or test this code.
Personal weather station parser from the Ambient Weather Network for the RainMachine sprinkler controller.
This parser was thrown together over a Sunday morning to feed data from an AMbient Weather PWS into a RainMachine. I pretty much never use Python, so if this isn't quite right, that's why. I wanted something that would pull data from my weather station without having to rely on WUnderground. You can still use WUnderground too but now you have two sources in case either one decides to change something or has a problem.
Every Ambient Weather PWS that's capable of uploading to ambientweather.net is identified by its MAC address. You'll also need an API Key and Application Key, which you can create at https://dashboard.ambientweather.net/account All three of those things are needed to use this parser.
- WS-2000 with Osprey sensor array
- ambientweather.net account
- RainMachine HD-16 (second gen), firmware v4.0.974
GitHub: https://github.com/WillCodeForCats/rainmachine-amweather
Upload the parser to your RainMachine at Settings -> Weather the click "Add New". It will appear under the "User Uploaded" tab where you can configure the keys and MAC address.
If there's a problem check under About -> VIEW LOG and see if there's an error. It logs as "user-ambientweather-parser".
To log station data when it runs, change your log level to "Debug" under Settings -> System Settings in the Advanced Settings section. Don't forget to change it back beucase it logs a lot of stuff from other parsers too.
There have been reports of the RainMachine rejecting a parser uploads with syntax issues on Windows.
- First: There's a fix in firmware version 4.0.989 for the Mini-8 and version 4.0.1115 for the Touch HD. I developed this on a Mac so I didn't come across the upload issue with firmware v4.0.974.
- Second: Save the "raw" file or download the release ZIP file.
Ambient Weather does have a LAN-based receiver, which at some point I may look into how to poll data directly from that and avoid any reliance on "the cloud" or internet access. But until that happens the ambientweather.net API is required. I'm not a huge fan of doing everything "in the cloud" for various reasons (privacy, exposure, etc.), so a LAN-only option is interesting to me.