Introduction

The Weather plugin is a ​Luup component that captures, displays, and periodically updates Temperature and Humidity data based upon Vera's current ​Location.

How does it work

Each user must register with ​Weather Underground to obtain a key. The plugin, when configured with the key, uses the Latitude / Longitude values configured in Vera's ​Location settings, and data provided by the Weather Underground (WUI) data feed, to retrieve:

• Temperature - The Current temperature
• Low Temperature - The estimated low temperature
• High Temperature - The estimated high temperature
• Humidity - The estimated humidity

Each of these values is presented as a Child Device of the Weather plugin, implementing the respective ​UPnP Service. They're all set to be visually grouped in the UI/Presentation.

Behind the scenes, the plugin uses Vera's Latitude and Longitude values, derived from the User-specified ​Location settings, to help form a URL to the Weather Underground (WUI) API. The user also has the option of explicitly specifying a location string within the Plugin itself.

The URL calls to WUI look like:

(https) api.wunderground.com/api/key/conditions/forecast/alerts/q/lat,long.xml OR

(https) api.wunderground.com/api/key/conditions/forecast/alerts/q/location.xml

The plugin selects elements from the XML output, and translates them into values that are set upon the respective Child Devices.

The Weather plugin retrieves the Weather data at startup and, by default, every 30 minutes after that.

Installation

• For UI4/UI5 Installation, please follow the UI4/UI5 Installation procedure

Scene Scripting

The Weather Plugin exposes a number of Variables:

• Condition (String) something representing the current Weather state (subject to language translation).
  
• ConditionGroup (String) an aggregation of weather Condititions to make scripting simpler (not subject to language translation)
• WindCondition (String) a value like "W at 2 mph".
• WindSpeed (Number) a value like "2" extracted from the WindCondition, specified in Local units (either kph or mph depending upon the setting of Metric)
• WindDirection (String) a value like "West, NW, North, etc"
• Period (Number) the number of seconds to delay before automatically polling the Weather feed. If blank, the default is 1800 seconds (30 minutes). This value cannot be < 10 or > 3600.
• LocationUsed (String) a "lat,long" value representing the Location actually used by the Weather service, since it may be different from that requested.

These variables can be accessed in Luup scenes.

Examples

To prevent a scene from firing when the weather is poor:

local t = luup.variable_get("urn:upnp-micasaverde-com:serviceId:Weather1", "ConditionGroup", 104)
if  ( (t == "sleet")
    or (t == "tstorms")
    or (t == "rain")
    or (t == "snow")
    or (t == "flurries")
then
  return true
else
  return false
end

Further examples can be found in the Discussion area referenced below.

The condition phrases are listed on the WUI site:

• Condition - ​Current Condition Phrases
• ConditionGroup - ​Forecast Condition Phrases

Discussion

The Weather plugin is discussed in this forum thread, along with a lot of it's development history:

​http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=1435.0

Feel free to ask questions on that thread, as well as make any suggestions & contributions to the future development of the Weather plugin's functionality.