Introducing pioneer.town/weather

[matt]

I’m proud to announce that Pioneertown now has it’s own weather station!

It currently reports wind, temperature, humidity, precipitation and UV in 10 second intervals.

We even have forecasting and real-time reporting, eat that Al Roker

Check it out at
https://pioneer.town/weather

The station hardware is getting upgraded soon; so check back for more features, including additional sensors, faster updates and a live camera feed.

To beta testers: If you prefer the original look and feel, it’s still available at:
https://pioneer.town/weather/classic

To other local geeks: This is a good start, but @matt is a hack of a web developer. Send him a message if you have skills and want to help.

[pitowngirl]

Love the new Pitown Weather Station! Great job setting up the locals weather station. Thanks, Matt.

[matt]

Thanks @pitowngirl

Here we all are in quarantine… I was pretty bored this morning, so I wrote a script to create animations from NOAA’s GOES-17 imagery (spectral band 13).

Every ten minutes, it grabs the last 50 images off the satellite, crops & composites a location marker on each frame and then assembles them all into a video.

Maybe I’ll also make one for NWS’s SOX NEXRAD site.

Check it out at pioneer.town/weather!

[Erica_Johnson]

Matt, this is amazing on the desktop! Super amazing work! Pays to be quarantined!

[matt]

haha, thanks @Erica_Johnson

Last night, I finally added a pressure sensor to the station hardware - so we now have a barometer!

I’m hoping to finish up the air quality sensor config this weekend… Pioneertown will soon have their own NowCast AQI

[matt]

Quick update on the weather station, since it’s raining!

The good news is that the rain gauge is working, though it’s under reporting by about 20%.
I will properly calibrate it once the rain stops.
(Thanks to @Pioneertowngirl & @Tom_Eastwood for helping me verify accuracy)

The not so good news is that I had to temporarily disable Air Quality reporting.
It was breaking other functionality of the weather website.

I promise AQI will be back soon

[Pioneertowngirl]

It’s been 23 days since you posted this? Good grief I’ve been slow lately.

[matt]

Looks like we have some weather rolling in

Don’t forget about pioneer.town/weather.

In addition to the weather stats, there’s live sattelite imagery and NWS alerts to help you track the storm and stay safe

[k.ben.loescher]

Hey Matt, is Pioneer.town/weather taking the holiday off? Love this feature of the site.

[jp1]

Hey Matt,

I’ve got web development skills if that’s useful. The weather site is currently down I’m afraid.

Joe

[matt]

Yeah, I broke it about a month ago.

It’s coming back online soon.

Going to make the data backend more resilient to internet disruption.

[matt]

Glad to report that pioneer.town/weather is back online!

The service should now be more robust, no more missing historical data.

I’m looking forward to working with @jp1 to further improve it!

[k.ben.loescher]

Awesome - thank you Matt!

[Pioneertown_Sun]

Thank you. The weather station information is very cool.

[matt]

Something is wrong with the weather station sensor hardware…

Over the past few weeks it has periodically stopped transmitting data and now we seem to have been down for the past 2 days.

I suspect it is a power issue. Will post when I know more.

Sorry for the downtime

Update:

Unfortunately, the receive radio has failed and will need to be replaced.

For anyone interested, here’s a diagram of how it all works and what broke:

[matt]

New radio installed: ptown weather is operational again

I read that the specific radio hardware I had been using has proven to be an unreliable design… So I replaced it with a similar model that has a good track record of reliability

[matt]

Seems I can’t catch a break with this hardware!

The high winds are making the rain bucket go

Rest assured, there has not actually been a foot of rain today in Pioneertown

I will remove the erroneous data from the database so it doesn’t skew other calculations.