Ecowitt

Alright, so we’re adding more sensors to the stack! I went with more Ecowitt sensors because they’ll just connect to the existing console and send data through the existing pipeline. Hardware I’m going to start with the WH57 lightning strike detector. I’ve selected this sensor to pair with an AQI sensor to build a home brew wildfire detection and alerting system. The lightning strike detector will detect strikes up to 25 miles out. The physical installation is easy and it comes with the mount and hardware necessary, just add batteries. ...

Ah, Sunday. The day of rest and relaxation… and troubleshooting why your entire network is down when you wake up. Now, I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious, I should have seen this coming. Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and noticed my watch’s screen was completely white and battery reporting 1%, which never happens as I charge every morning while I get ready and the battery will last until the next morning. The watch is unrelated, but it was a sign for sure. ...

Grafana is a tool that allows you to build dashboards to visualize data. I haven’t gone too deep into the full capabilities yet, but I wanted a way to display the weather data from my database without reinventing the wheel and building dashboards manually myself. Install & Config Grafana is available as an app on TrueNAS SCALE, which is the OS that runs on my NAS. In the configuration, I’ll select “Publish port on the host for external access” for the Port Bind Mode in the network configuration so other hosts on my LAN can access the Grafana web UI with the default port 3000. Timescale and Portainer are using different ports, so I’ll have no conflicts between the three services and all can be accessed via their respective ports on the NAS IP (and hostname down the road when I get around to setting up Pi-hole). For the host IP, I’ll select ‘0.0.0.0’ (aka any) IP address because TrueNAS isn’t allowing me to select the host IP, but I’ve got traffic locked down pretty well with my VLAN and firewall rules setup. ...

Today I’m going to set up my local weather station in my yard that will feed data to my database that stores the forecast data I’m pulling from NWS. NWS gives me projected future data, but I’m not able to see what’s happening in my yard, until now. Down the road, I’ll perform some analysis comparing forecast data to observed data which will be useful for future automation and machine learning. ...