Standalone solar sensor

Hi

I have an Vaisala WXT520 which does not have a solar Sensor.
Is there a way to get the the solar data into Weather Display from another source e.g. a text file or from a json file?

I can access the sensor via an api.
https://api.wetter-arbon.ch/v1/data/radiation

Thank you
Daniel

I’m hopeful someone here can answer the question, since I have the same situation.

The only two stations I have that can bring in solar data to WD directly are the Davis and the Texas Weather Instruments 8000.

I have other stations I’d like to have show the solar data. It is much more useful that I thought it would be.

The two that do show it have sensors that connect to the station itself, and then WD reads the output of those stations and plots, displays and sends it on.

I have a couple Rainwise that were not designed to have solar radiation sensors (although now there are versions, but not the popular and affordable stations, and the Peet Brothers station which I’ve found to be very robust, but also does not have a solar radiation sensor attachment.

I would think that there must be a way, since there was an effort a year or so ago for Brian to adapt his program to accept input from a laser range finder to process snow depth data, and extra temperature sensors are spoken of, but I do not know how to do that (yet, I’m hoping to learn through your inquiry.)

I look at it as a ‘team approach’ to gaining all these values. The stations that ‘do it all’ are wonderful, but otherwise leaves many good ones out of being used to furnish WD with all the values we may be interested in.

The team might be a station such as the WXT520 or a Peet Brothers which produces the majority of the values such as temperature, humiity, wind speed, direction and so on, but then add on, stand alone devices which generate another function such as cloud height or in our concern, solar radiation, or snow depth. Those independent setups would have to produce a value in a form and range that WD expects, perhaps with calibration factors, and WD would have to know where to pick up those values (I’m speculating, but say in a named file in a directory, and have WD read that input and integrate it into the total weather display, whether or not it came from just one station.

I could see a snow depth setup writing it’s value to a file, say “snowdepth.txt”, solar radiation meaurements written to another text file such as “Solar.txt” and every time WD took in a data stream from the station, it would also look to these other files (if enabled through a check box to indicated it should do that) and make it appear as if all the data came in from the station, as designed.

Even my modest needs would benefit from this, and with WD doing so much and being so versatile, I’d hope that this was an option. I’ve never had the need to do it until now and would like to hear from someone who knows WD inside and out if this is even possible, and if so, how do you do it?

Thanks for raising the question and I hope we have a positive answer from one of the experts here.
Dale


The capability exists to get UV and solar from a file but I can’t find it in WD at the moment. It’s referred to in this thread. It may be somewhere in the cloud sensor set up but don’t have the time to look for it today :dontknow:

I can add support to get that data from
https://api.wetter-arbon.ch/v1/data/radiation

This will be great to ad-it…

Niko,
thanks, that’s a lot more to go on than I had. Dale

Brian, your comment:
“I can add support to get that data from
https://api.wetter-arbon.ch/v1/data/radiation

implies that you will add functionality to WD to go to a web site, retrieve data, then incorporated it into WD.

For those who want a self contained system, can you do the same thing but instead of pointing to a web site, point to a file that is local on my computer?

Maybe as Niko indicates there is something like this already in WD and I’ve just not found it.
Is there a Wiki or YouTube video on how to do this, like so many other things you explain?

Thanks. Dale

Dale: The functionality I referenced is on:

Setup / Advanced Misc Settings / Boltwood Home-Made etc. Custom | Use Custom Input

The format of skylog,txt is shown in the thread I linked above.

that would be one way maybe to do this, what Niko has found?

I would appreciate that very much. Great would be if we could also feed some extra temperature sensors like Watertemparature. https://api.wetter-arbon.ch/v1/data/watertemperature1m :slight_smile:

Any source would work for me like a textfile i can put the current data in.

do you mean you can get the needed data into a text file in any format?
i.e so I would just need to have some sort of standard input that you format too ?
(for extra sensor data)

There is something new about this option? :roll:

I don’t know
I did got any response to my last post