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Radio Technology

Watson W8681 weather station feeding data to WUnderground via a Raspberry Pi

Install Raspbian on your Pi. In the setup process go to Advanced and enable SSH. Also, set it to boot to the command line rather than the desktop – you should be able to run this headless.

Do some basic maintenance

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo rpi-update
sudo reboot

Install Python

sudo apt-get install python-configobj

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install python-cheetah
sudo apt-get install python-imaging
sudo apt-get install python-usb

Now install WeeWX
Visit http://weewx.com/downloads to find the link to the latest .deb file. In this case it is weewx_3.3.1-1_all.deb.
Download it:

wget http://weewx.com/downloads/weewx_3.3.1-1_all.deb

Install it:

sudo dpkg -i weewx_3.3.1-1_all.deb

The installer will ask you for a location, lat/long (decimal degrees) of your location, altitude, station type and hardware model.
For the W8681 it is a “FineOffsetUSB” type, and the model # is “W-8681”

sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog

will give you an idea of if it is working or not.
If dpkg complains of missing dependencies then simply perform sudo apt-get update followed by sudo apt-get -f install.

You might notice in the syslog that you get a USB error – this occurs if you have not yet plugged in the weather station receiver.

sudo /etc/init.d/weewx stop

Plug in the receiver if you haven’t already.
Then, edit /etc/weewx/weewx.conf. I used nano. You will need to be root.
Adjust settings such as piping it to wunderground, or to aprs.fi/CWOP if you would like.
Save the file, and then start weewx again:

sudo /etc/init.d/weewx start

Done.

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