About this Blog

I built this blog for a couple reasons. The first is that I enjoy writing now and again. Sometimes about work and often about family, fishing or mini-farming and sometimes combinations of the above. Second, I chose Jekyll so that I’d get my hands dirty learning something new. It turns out static site generators are very powerful but non-trivial, at least for me.

About This Site

This site is built using Jekyll and hosted on Github using Github Pages. I use a Minima-modified theme, that I forked from minima, although there are a ton of really great themes for Jekyll out there.

The Weather link goes to a weewx instance running on an Amazon Lightsail. It used to be fed from a Raspberry Pi 400 (also running weewx) running in my house that polls for UDP packets from a Weatherflow Tempest. For that I used the Weewx Weatherflow UDP driver from captain-coredump which works rather nicely! The Tempest comes with a REST, UDP Broadcast and Websocket API that are all fun to play with. It also has out of the box integrations including to Weather Underground where my station is named KWAOLYMP512.

Since using the UDP interface I decided I wanted to publish my data to the public internet. To do that I spun up an Amazon Lightsail server and begain forwarding data to it using the Weewx Rsync report. While that worked it seemed wasteful to have a middle man when the data is availalbe via an API so ia built a custom Weewx driver for the Weatherflow WS API. It can be found at in this github repo. There are still some improvements to make around when the Tempest goes offline (loss of power primarily) and I’d like to setup an auto-restart for the Weewx service to recover from failures but all up it’s proven to be pretty stable. I also wrote a Weewx WIKI page on driver development tips to capture what I learned.