hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1163.txt

Episode: 1163
Title: HPR1163: Installing PYWWS on a Raspberry Pi
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1163/hpr1163.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 20:49:35

---


My name's Peter from the Kennelpeg podcast and if anyone has ever listened to the show,
you'd realize that I've purchased a raspberry pie probably about 12 months ago.
And at the time, I thought I'd use it for home automation, because I run how you
use the X10 stuff, but then I'm really already doing that on the missbox and considering the
missboxes on more or less whenever we're in the house and want to use home automation.
Well, I thought, well, there's not much really point doing that anyway.
Now I thought, I'll put XBMXC on it, which I did.
And that was fun for the first 15 minutes just having a muck of lamb with us,
but really over the years, I've sort of got all my TVs and in each room we each have a sort of
laptop that we have XBMXC, misspronins on, so that the home entertainment side of things really
is pretty well covered with all different net books and dedicated misspronins for the television
and projector and all that sort of stuff. So the pie came out of the cupboard once or twice,
I might decide I'm going to install one of the distributions and try an emulator or something,
and I happen to have a 121 each one or 19, I think it was sitting in the cupboard, so I thought
I'll hook it up to that. You know, I get the urge to do something, but after a while, I got
bored of it. So what I thought one day, I don't know where I got the idea from, but I've always
had an old weather station here, which really, it tends to signal back to just a sort of dedicated,
little, little monitor that really doesn't do much, it just tells you that wind speed and
temperature outside and inside and if you really, and rainfall, rather rainfall won't stop working
some time ago. Now to turn it out, we had Jeff Hogan on the Colonel Panicock cast, and here's
the project leader of Bowdy Glinnips, and as I was doing a bit of research, I happen to notice
that Bowdy Glinnips is above what for the arm, and you know, the Raspberry Pi, and I thought,
okay, I'll grab it, and I'll put it on there, and I have a play around with it. There's
users that like the mint and we had also, and if you'd raster me, who started the Enlightenment
project many years ago, and so I was keen to get and have a play with the new release in
like the 17, which is on Bowdy Glinnips. Anyway, we had Jeff Hogan, and we discussed, you know,
Bowdy and all that, and I had set up my Raspberry Pi with it, and once again, it was almost at the
time when it was going to get back in the cupboard, and I thought, ah, there must be something I can do
with this, and I was looking on the eBay, and I came across a weather station that was able to hook
up to a computer, and you could download all the information off the weather station, we caught it
on your Windows machine, and I thought, well, the people are doing this in Windows, you're
only so much written something where you could do it Linux. After a bit of social around,
I came across the Pi, W, S, that's Papa Yankee Wishy Sierra, which is the Python software for
USB wireless weather stations. After going through, like just looking around, looking at the pictures,
well, a lot of the stations look very similar to the one I was looking at on eBay, and I thought
I would bugger it off by it, and I also read that, although it does list quite a few weather stations
on the Google code page of Pi, W, W, S, it also goes on to say that any that use easy weather
Windows software is probably going to be compatible with, and that so happens is what this one I got
you so I thought, well, bugger it off, I'll buy it, it was $99, which was pretty good
price I thought, because the actual screen it comes with, even if you weren't going to do,
hook it up to a Raspberry Pi, or in fact, your Linux computer, you'd be more than happy just
to have your screen sit in somewhere that you go up and page back through the history, and
it records, I think it said about two weeks worth of data, and that could be wrong,
but if it isn't two weeks, it's more than two weeks, it might even be as much as a month,
bad, or whole before the memory feels up, and you've got it cleared. There's also, and if you're
not into Linux, there's the weather software that came with easy weather, it's pretty average
really, it looks like something that you would have run back 1995, Windows 1995, but there's a
project called Cumulus that looks very good, and unfortunately, I tried to get that running in
minor, and it ran fine in minor, that's your program did, but it could not connect it to the
the weather station, because the software asked for a comport, now I did read how you do assign
comports in minor, it's just a simple matter of looking for your device in
postlash, their postlash year is B, postlash, H-I-D-D-E-V-0, and you make that link to your
1 directory, postlash, dust devices, postlash, comp, and 0 will come one, whatever you want to do,
but unfortunately, it still didn't work. But anyway, I did all that, and I still couldn't connect
to Cumulus too, which was unfortunate, just I would have liked to use that on my laptop as the
software for the scene, but it does work in virtual box, so I suppose that's better than the
big need for us, we know it's anyway, but as it turns out, that's not what I wanted, what I wanted
to be able to do was download the information of the weather station and upload it onto the internet,
and that way, you know, if I'm running along my mower, because I work at a golf course and spend a
lot of time, this special this time, you said, on the mower, it would be handy to be able to just jump
up my phone and just log on to the internet and see what the weather's doing, what the wind speed is,
how hot it is, whatever, I thought that was pretty cool. Anyway, rather than sit here and
read a bunch of commands, it goes through every step that I had to do to get higher weather station
up and running. What I thought I might just outline a couple of caveats, so in the show notes,
I'll put a link to the Colonel Panicolcast forum where you can go through and just follow a half
to, you know, with all the commands that you need to, or just Google it, I mean, that's what I did,
I came across a few places that I told you how to do it, the only difference I did was, I was
using Bodie Linux, but Bodie, the Raspberry Pi port of Bodie is based on Weezy anyway, so, you know,
if you use Weezy or Raspin, I'm sure this would all be very similar. The only thing you have to do
first, and this is really the only bit that stuck me, was because in the repo, some of the things
in particular, the first one you come across is Cyphern, and you're going to say, okay,
what the heck is Cyphern anywhere? Well, Cyphern is a compiled language that generates the
seed Python extension modules. These extension modules can be loaded and used by regular Python
code using the import statement. Well, at least that's what Wikipedia says. I really got no idea,
but all I think it was known that the version in the Bodie repost was only versions,
15, I think, or something, and the POWS wanted version 16, I should say actually 0.0.16,
and if you have a look at the on the internet, well, the latest package is Cyphern 0.17.4, so
I pull that down and you have to compile that. Now, the first few times I tried to do it,
I came up with an error, and when I read back through the logs, I had absolutely no bloody idea.
What I was trying to tell me, of course, after I did my Google, and I can't find the entry
where I tend to be made JLNG, as the Colonel Panticock cast listeners know he missed the J-men,
and I said, go, JLNG, what the hell is going on here? And I pasted the logs in the paste bin,
and JLNG had a look at it and said, well, that's not telling us a lot, and I thought, well,
it's not bloody telling me nothing, that's for sure. But JLNG was able to find out that a lot of
people have been trouble compiling stuff on the Raspberry Pi because they run out of memory.
And as soon as he said that, I bloody remembered reading about this major scale, and the first thing
you have to do, you have to go and start the Raspberry Pi configuration, which is, you know,
pseudo-RASPI-config, and you have to go down and look for the memory spread because you're running
out of main memory. What you have to do is allocate less memory to the GPU. The default is 64,
I reduced it down to 16, and then went, and you saved that, and you're going to have to reboot,
make sure you do this first. And then after that, well, that was really any problem.
After that, I didn't have any trouble compiling. And any of this stuff I had to do, and kept in mind
that my Raspberry Pi is only the 256-meter version, and you probably won't have the same problem
if you have the later version anyway, as it has twice the memory RAM. Now, there's a number of things
you have to go through and compile yourself because the repos will be a bit old. Live USB was
another one. I think in the repos it was version 1, and in this particular instance that they're
asking for 1.0.9, and also the sites and HIDAPI, and you've got to pull that down through
it. Like I said, I won't go through all this, I'll put them in the forum and step by step guide
that I followed a couple of people's guides as I was going along. But virtually, it really didn't
take too long. I suppose I've probably been going to be a half an hour going down through and doing
it, but it would have been a hell of a quick header, not come across that from pile area from
running out of RAM all the time. And once you're getting stored, it's just a simple matter of running
Python test weather station.py, and if all's gone well, you'll get a bunch of numbers, you know,
scroll across your screen, and that's virtually telling you that it is probing your weather station
and getting a return of all that data. And then of course, once you've got all the data,
then you have to go and do something with it all. And fortunately,
this high WS comes with a bunch of templates that you can go through, and you can set up the
weather config follow, I think it was, weather.com. And you can get this thing to post it on Twitter,
you know, every hour or whatever, upload it to your weather.com details to Twitter, you can
I really wasn't interested in that. You can also let it to the weather underground,
which is pretty cool. From what I understand, I really haven't looked at weather underground before,
but and Ashley J. Lindsey told me that weather's own, the weather channel just bought it. Actually,
it's a pretty popular site from what I understand and it actually looks pretty good. But anyway,
say you can upload it to weather underground or in Microsoft Instance, I just wanted to upload
to weather.curnalpanic.cast.net. And once again, it's typically there's a few things you can
upload like it, you know, 24 hours. It just makes a PNG of like the charging graphs that you can,
oh, it generates like a 24-hour pool featured PNG, which gives you your humidity temperature
and dew point in one of the charts and under that you've got your wind speed, which is gas
and average. Then it's got wind direction, which is spotted across the crack just with north,
west, south east. And so on rainfall, unfortunately, we haven't that much of that here. We're home at
the moment, which is spits out and pressure and heat the pass schools. And you can change it,
the default was for wind speed note to be in miles per hour, but it's not hard to go on and change
to commoners per hour. Once again, I'll just put a link to the different charts you can have,
you can have a seven day chart, monthly charts, I really haven't played with all of it yet,
because I've only had to swing right on for about four days, so I have together the hell of a lot
of information. But anyway, for those of you who have aroused high sitting up in the carpet,
and really don't have much to do with it, I think you could do a lot worse than to go and spend
the 99 bucks, and I'm sure if you're looking at it, you might get out of 50 or 60 dollars,
I think it's 50 or 60 dollars, well spent on one of these weather stations, so they're pretty good
and considerate. But anyway, thank you for listening, and Martin said,
feeling complete, so for forever, and you won't get too far wrong. Okay, please let us.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, or takeer public radio does our.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday and Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener by yourself.
If you ever consider recording a podcast, then visit our website to find out how easy it
really is. Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital.pound and the
economical and computer club. HBR is funded by the binary revolution
at binref.com, all binref projects are crowd-responsive by linear pages.
From shared hosting to custom private clouds, go to lunarpages.com for all your hosting needs.
Unless otherwise stasis, today's show is released under a creative commons,
attribution, share a lot, read those own license.