Category Archives: Raspberry PI

Setting up a Linux Weather WebCam

The weather effects our lives everyday and weather websites are among the most heavily trafficked on the web. They tell us whether we will need an umbrella today or what to pack for a trip across the country.

Weather webcams are always popular and it is easy and free to set one up yourself.  This article will show how to setup a simple USB webcam to produce still images and serve them on a local apache webserver.

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Formatting xml in emacs

I had this problem of debugging some xml but when reading the output of some log4j it was almost impossible to read so I needed some way of prettifying the xml quickly.

For this example I have the following xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?><xml><iq xmlns="jabber:component:accept" from="test1@temp.retep.org/client" id="iq_257" to="service.retep.org" type="get"><query xmlns="some:namespace"/></iq></xml>

So how do we pretify this in emacs?

Well the first thing to do is to write an extension function & place it into your ~/.emacs file. Placing it here means that when you open emacs the extension is available:

(defun xml-format ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (shell-command-on-region (mark) (point) "xmllint --format -" (buffer-name) t)
  )
)

Now this works by passing the buffer to the xmllint utility and replaces it with the output – in this case nicely formatted xml.

Now we need to install xmllint:

pi@lindesfarne: ~$ sudo apt-get install libxml2-utils

Ok so now open emacs and open the xml. To format first select the xml you want to format then Press Escape then x followed by xml-format & press return. You should then get the xml nicely formatted:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xml>
  <iq xmlns="jabber:component:accept" from="test1@temp.retep.org/client" id="iq_257" to="service.retep.org" type="get">
    <query xmlns="some:namespace"/>
  </iq>
</xml>

Installing a USB Weather Station on a Raspberry PI part 2

In the first article I covered how to install a weather station on a Raspberry PI. In the second part I’ll cover how to get it to upload data on an hourly basis to a website using FTP.

Getting the station to run hourly

First we need to get the station to run hourly. To do this I created a script called weatherupload which I placed under /usr/local/bin

pi@kell: ~$ sudo vi /usr/local/bin/weatherupload

Enter the following:

#!/bin/bash
cd /usr/local/weather
python Hourly.py -vvv data

Once saved make it executable and then edit the main crontab:

pi@kell: ~$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/weatherupload
pi@kell: ~$ sudo vi /etc/crontab

At the end of the file you need to add the following:

0 * * * * root /usr/local/bin/weatherupload

Save it and now every hour it will now run.

Note: I’ve placed it there and not under /etc/cron.hourly because

  1. cron.hourly runs once an hour, but not necessarily at the top of the hour. I a later article when I add twitter you want the tweet to be close to 0m rather than at a random time.
  2. I’ve found in the past that using crontab -e doesn’t always work, even for root but in the core crontab it just works

Uploading to a website

First to generate the graphs pywws uses gnuplot so we need to install it:

pi@kell: ~/sudo apt-get install gnuplot

Next we need to add some details to the stations weather.ini file. At the top theres a section called paths. Make sure those point to the relevant templates and graph_templates directories in your pywws install.
Next under the hourly section you should see a pair of lines:

plot = []
text = []

You need to add the plots and pages that need to be generated:

plot = ['7days.png.xml', '24hrs.png.xml', 'rose_24hrs.png.xml', 'rose_7days_nights.png.xml']
text = ['current.html', '24hrs.html', '6hrs.html', '7days.html', 'feed_hourly.xml', 'allmonths.html']

Finally theres the ftp section which needs configuring with the remote ftp server (your web host will give you these):

[ftp]
secure = False
site = ftp.example.com
local site = False
user = myaccount@example.com
directory = /weather/
password = mypassword

That’s about it. Now when you run the hourly script it will generate some simple pages & images to your website.

You can see an example of this over at maidstoneweather.com – although the uploaded templates only form part of that site.

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