Raspberry Pi and Weather

I’ve just set up my new Raspberry Pi as a web server for the weather station my wife got me for my birthday last year.

The initial setup was very straightforward:

• Plug the Raspberry Pi into the TV and power up
• Configure the Pi to start into console mode (as I’m running the Pi as a headless server) and install ssh
• Log on, startx and set up the USB wifi module.

... and the first interesting problem was that I couldn’t access the Pi using its name; ssh (and ping and everything else) could only use the IP address. Running

sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon

 got around this problem—I can now ssh to dave@raspberrypi.local :-)

Next issue—while the time had been set once the wifi had been set up, the time zone was all wrong. Running

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

allowed me to set the timezone correctly. Now I could shut down, move the Pi to where the weather station console is, restart and set up Cumulus. Again, it was fairly straightforward following the instructions:

• Install mono-complete
• Unzip the CumulusMX installation files into ~/CumulusMX
• Run Cumulus using sudo mono CumulusMX.exe

At this stage, I haven’t plugged in the weather station. I was then able to set up the location, units etc using the web interface from my laptop. Once correctly set up, I then stopped Cumulus.

As the weather station was installed before Christmas, I wanted to ensure that all te data was downloaded. I edited the newly-created file Cumulus.ini:

StartDate=Monday, 21 December 2015

and created the file data/today.ini:

[General]

Date=21/12/2015

Timestamp=2015-12-21T00:00:00

CurrentYear=2015

CurrentMonth=12

CurrentDay=21

Running Cumulus again downloaded all the data from 21 Dec, and we were in business!

Last thing to set up was ensuring Cumulus kept running evening when I exited ssh, so I used the script kindly provided by slashmusic—this worked perfectly, and I now have my Pi running as a little webserver collecting weather information continuously!