Lua code to query current local wind speed (Success)

steffan · March 14, 2021, 7:03pm

My location gets occasional high winds so I’ve always wanted to avoid farmbot movement. With the Lua capability this is now easy! Just sign up for a free account on Weather Stack. Here is what worked for me to query the wind speed as an integer:

url="http://api.weatherstack.com/current?access_key=<API_KEY>&query=<ZIP_CODE>"

res, err = http({ url = url, method = 'GET'})

if err then
    send_message("error", "ERROR: " .. inspect(err), {"toast"})
else
    wind_speed = json.decode(res.body).current.wind_speed
   
    send_message("info", "Wind Speed:" .. tostring(wind_speed))
end

RickCarlino · March 14, 2021, 8:32pm

That’s a great use case @steffan . I too have been using a weather API for some personal FarmBot usage. I have been meaning to add this one to the examples documentation but have not gotten around to it yet.

The snippet below will check the weather for Chicago and display a toast about the current conditions. This could easily be adapted to other use cases (an exercise that I will leave to the reader).

resp, err = http({
    verb="GET",
    url="http://wttr.in/Chicago,Illinois\?format=j1"
})

if err then
  return send_message("error", "Weather error.")
end
weather = json.decode(resp.body)
temp = tonumber(weather.current_condition[1].FeelsLikeC)

if temp > 22 then
  send_message("info", "It's warm today. Temp (C): " .. temp, "toast")
else
  send_message("info", "It's cold today. Temp (C): " .. temp, "toast")
end

In my case, I used wttr.in as it does not require registration or API keys. I will be sure to check out Weather Stack to see how they compare!

EDIT: It appears that Weather Stack offers historical weather information, which could easily be integrated for things like not watering after a rainy day, watering more on dry days, etc… Thanks again for sharing!

mdingena · March 14, 2021, 10:59pm

wttr.in uses a service that currently has a huge bug. That URL you are using for Chicago is returning weather info for a place called Mccormickville. The JSON output always returns the next town over rather than the actual town queried.

github.com/chubin/wttr.in

JSON `nearest_area` is one city over

opened 06:05PM - 02 Sep 20 UTC

pragma-

bug work-started geolocation data-source api

## Todo * [ ] Add `queried_location` to JSON response ## Details A whil…e ago I submitted a PR to add `includeLocation` to the weather query in order to get `nearest_area` in the JSON result. This had been working flawlessly and fantastically up until about a month ago or so. Now the `areaName` field is consistently one or two cities away instead of the city being queried. For example, `los angeles` gives results for `hillgrove, california`. `new york city` gives `oakland gardens, new york`. `london, uk` gives `cubitt town, tower hamlets, greater london, united kingdom`. A month ago all of these used to return the expected city. This is disconcerting because I cannot tell if WWO (wttr's weather backend) simply no longer has access to weather stations in those cities or if its database look-up is broken in some way or if the `nearest_area` has been changed to do something else now. Do you know why this is happening? By the way, I was looking over the PRs and I saw that somebody had recently submitted a PR to use an IP-location service because the WWO location results have been very inaccurate lately. Instead, I hope we can resolve the WWO location result issue to be accurate once again.

jsimmonds · March 15, 2021, 7:11am

Seems the bug is fixed in the data provider after 2021-03-01 (?) according to that GitHub Issue.

mdingena · March 15, 2021, 7:58am

If you check Rick’s link you can see that it doesn’t give data for Chicago.

jsimmonds · March 15, 2021, 9:58am

Right. But the geographic locality is basically Chicago central ! ( according to Mr Google Maps )
55 East Erie Street has the approx. coords given.

    "nearest_area": [
        {
            "areaName": [
                {
                    "value": "Mccormickville"
                }
            ],
            "country": [
                {
                    "value": "United States of America"
                }
            ],
            "latitude": "41.894",
            "longitude": "-87.626",
            "population": "0",
            "region": [
                {
                    "value": "Illinois"
                }
            ],
            "weatherUrl": [
                {
                    "value": ""
                }
            ]
        }
    ],
    "request": [
        {
            "query": "Lat 41.88 and Lon -87.62",
            "type": "LatLon"
        }
    ],
    "weather": [

RickCarlino · March 15, 2021, 12:44pm

McCormickville is (was) a neighborhood in Chicago. Chicago is a big city, so it is often split into smaller neighborhoods. McCormickville still has a “Chicago, IL” mailing address.

If you pick a smaller city, such as “Blooimgdale, IL”, you might get the weather for “Addison, IL”, but that is probably close enough for the sake of gardening (there are no microclimates in Illinois).