JMFweather.UK Blog

Feb

2024

Keeping work pleasant

My office for working at home is in the conservatory. Although it has a solid roof now it can still be a little bit colder than the main house when outside it’s 0C.
I’ve created a monitoring system to check the temperature and when working, or overnight, stop the place getting too cold. I control a heater via a wi-fi connected plug and control that though it’s API. I even manage to capture the temperature changes and can see how good or bad things have been.

7-Day Temperature Chart

I have added “switches” to override the heating for various cases. Summer is coming so this should be used less…but it is only February so we’re not in the clear yet.

Aug

2022

Solar & UV

While the family was busy camping last week I determined how to add independent Solar and UV capability to my weather station setup.

I did this using two sensors from the ThePiHut.com

Grove Digital Light Sensor – TSL2561 (here)
Digital LTR390-C UV Ultraviolet Sensor (here)

Solar & UV sensors

With a small breadboard I was able to wire both of these into my Raspberry PI alongside the AQI sensor and CO₂/VOC sensor. Each sensor has its own code (made into a daemon for 24×7 running) to report the values and write them to the /var/www/html directory so that they can be read across my internal network.

Using the custom.plugin option within my Meteobridge NanoSD I was able to directly read each value across the network to the Raspberry Pi using a simple “wget” statement and then map the additional readings to main readings for use elsewhere eg. “sol2!1rad –> sol0rad” and “uv2!1index –>uv0index”.

The readings from these can be seen in box 6 on my default weather display (here)

Jul

2022

UK Heatwave – July 2022

The UK heatwave set new records in all countries of the UK

My own station recorded a new high of 37.6C which then dropped some 13.6C the following day.

Nov

2021

We got married

Jul

2021

NitroPack Plugin – Does what it says…

I was testing this blog site for performance on https://gtmetrix.com/ and it was getting poor results:

Grade C; Performance 65%; Structure 85%

This is not good. Almost two seconds for the first content to be visible. So I did a bit of googling and found out about NitroPack https://nitropack.io/ which is supposed to sort out performance issues etc.

Signed up for a free account and let it do its thing on my blog. The change was dramatic:

Yup. Every metric that matters is in the green. That’ll do.

Jul

2021

Giving up on GRAV

After much back’n’forth with FastHosts and the issues with the various levels of PHP support within GRAV I’ve opted to go back to WordPress as my CMS. This will take a while to re-build all the old entries but I was never a prolific blogger anyway.

Update: It actually took only about three hours to build the site and re-create all the blog posts from the GRAV backup. Whilst there is a WP to Grav tool there is no Grav to WP. It all had to be done manually.

Jul

2021

AQI Updated

Another AQI update: This now incorporates data from the Davis Airlink to capture conservatory temperatures

Dec

2020

iPhone Mini 12 Time

After three years with my iPhone X I decided to upgrade. I’m still paying £15 for unlimited data so I still planned to buy the phone upfront.

So…why the Mini version? Because having considered all aspects the Pro and Pro Max are really for people who need the photograpy/videograpy capabilites, and the RAW format, that those phones have to offer. You are of course paying a premium for those features. That leaves the 12 or 12 Mini.

Having thoroughly reviewed the phones and what I do with mine on a daily basis, and the convenience of a smaller handset, the iPhone 12 Mini was the choice for me. It was also a lot cheaper than the others (in comparative Apple terms; you can get very decent Android phones for a quarter of the price of any iPhone) even after I’d opted for 128GB of storage.

Yes, like almost everyone else, I bought the blue version.

Jul

2020

AQI Update

I added another sensor via the Raspberry Pi. A SGP30 CO₂ & VOC sensor. The updated page now looks like the above.

It does take some time to get the sensor to reach a baseline and start reporting. I think the CO₂ baseline is still too high and it doesn’t move off 400ppm.

Jun

2020

Air Quality Index

I decided to add Air Quality to my weather setup. The ideal is a Purple Air sensor but that costs $250 and even more to ship to the UK.

A bit of research shows that I can do the same using a Nova SDS011 and my Raspberry Pi. It’s a very straightofward setup and the code to run and collect the data is readily available.

The challenge I had was to add code to upload the data to my website and then get the website to use the data and display it.

After about half a day of coding, and a few tweaks in subsequent days, I ended up with the page above.

You can also see the data uploaded to the AQICN.ORG website for worldwide AQI coverage