haccuweather

A custom entity modification of the AccuWeather integration in Home Assistant.

This is a WIP for use with the default or any supported weather card in Home Assistant or HACS. It creates an entity that can be used anywhere entities are supported in Home Assistant.

This custom component was created in an attempt to leverage the limited (free) API plan offered by AccuWeather. At the time of writing, the limited (free) plan offers a maximum of 50 calls/day. The provided AccuWeather integration for Home Assistant was exceeding the alotted number of calls in a day. This component calls the API for current conditions and the forecast once per frequency from the last check. The frequency can be adjusted in the configuration.yaml file.

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Installation

1. Clone or download the repository into your config/custom_components directory. Name or rename the directory haccuweather. (So it should be config/custom-components/haccuweather)

2. Add the following to your configuration.yaml file.

   weather:
     - platform: haccuweather
       data_path: </path/to/json/data/folder> #example: /home/homeassistant/.homeassitant/custom_components/haccuweather/data
       API_key: <your_AccuWeather_API_key>
       location_key: <your_AccuWeather_location_key>
       frequency: <time_in_seconds> #3600 (1 hour) is recommended for the limited plan
   haccuweather:

   The data_path must be writable by the user running Home Assistant. The script that fetches the data from the AccuWeather API will write two files into this directory (current.json & forecast.json). These two files will contain the responses from Python requests using the location_key & your API_key. See the AccuWeather API reference page for obtaining an API key and location key.

   frequency is the number of seconds from the last check that the component should call the API.

3. Restart Home Assistant.

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Changelog

2021JAN11: Added custom service to call API manually/forecfully. See service haccuweather.call_api in developer tools or in available service calls in automations/scripts.

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Troubleshooting

Icons aren't showing for certain conditions using HACS weather-card.

• The weather-card.js file in the $config/www/community/weather-card must be edited to include cases for the specific conditions. I've had the best luck opening the weather-card.js.gz archive, editing the weather-card.js file inside, saving & updating the archive, extracting the file to the directory overwriting the existing file and reloading the page. Of course, updates could kill this, so make a backup!

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For the Future

1. The plan is to reduce the frequency of forecast polling to a maximum of 4 times a day. It is my thought that a 5 day forecast doesn't need to be as up to date as the current conditions. This will allow for the current conditions to be updated more frequently than once per hour. This also opens up the possibility for weather alerts. For now, functionality for intermitent viewing is more important. I have found that a majority of the time, I check the weather on my phone using a dedicated app or widget. Home Assistant is more of a general information portal for the day's weather.

2. A translation file and/or icons would be a nice feature set for this component. Though, at this time, that is out of scope for a component, better suited to an integration or frontend module.