mscroggs.co.uk
mscroggs.co.uk

subscribe

Blog

Raspberry Pi weather station

 2013-07-11 
On 19 June, the USB temperature sensor I ordered from Amazon arrived. This sensor is now hooked up to my Raspberry Pi, which is taking the temperature every 10 minutes, drawing graphs, then uploading them here. Here is a brief outline of how I set this up:

Reading the temperature

I found this code and adapted it to write the date, time and temperature to a text file. I then set cron to run this every 10 minutes. It writes the data to a text file (/var/www/temperature2) in this format:
2013 06 20 03 50,16.445019
2013 06 20 04 00,16.187843
2013 06 20 04 10,16.187843
2013 06 20 04 20,16.187843

Plotting the graphs

I found a guide somewhere on the internet about how to draw graphs with Python using Pylab/Matplotlib. If you have any idea where this could be, comment below and I'll put a link here.
In the end my code looked like this:
 python 
import time
import matplotlib as mpl
mpl.use("Agg")
import matplotlib.pylab as plt
import matplotlib.dates as mdates

ts = time.time()
import datetime
now = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(ts)
st = mdates.date2num(datetime.datetime(int(float(now.strftime("%Y"))),
                                       int(float(now.strftime("%m"))),
                                       int(float(now.strftime("%d"))),
                                       0, 0, 0))
weekst = st - int(float(datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(ts).strftime("%w")))
= file("/var/www/temperature2","r")
= []
= []
tt = []
ss = []
= []
= []
= []
= []
= []
weekt = []
weektt = []
weeks = []
weekss = []
mini = 1000
maxi = 0
cur = -1
datC = 0

for line in f:
    fL = line.split(",")
    fL[0] = fL[0].split(" ")
    if cur == -1:
        cur = mdates.date2num(datetime.datetime(int(float(fL[0][0])),
                                                int(float(fL[0][1])),
                                                int(float(fL[0][2])),
                                                0,0,0))
        datC = mdates.date2num(datetime.datetime(int(float(fL[0][0])),
                                                 int(float(fL[0][1])),
                                                 int(float(fL[0][2])),
                                                 int(float(fL[0][3])),
                                                 int(float(fL[0][4])),
                                                 0))
    u.append(datC)
    v.append(fL[1])
    if datC >= st and datC <= st + 1:
        t.append(datC)
        s.append(fL[1])
    if datC >= st - 1 and datC <= st:
        tt.append(datC + 1)
        ss.append(fL[1])
    if datC >= weekst and datC <= weekst + 7:
        weekt.append(datC)
        weeks.append(fL[1])
    if datC >= weekst - 7 and datC <= weekst:
        weektt.append(datC + 7)
        weekss.append(fL[1])
    if datC > cur + 1:
        g.append(cur)
        h.append(mini)
        i.append(maxi)
        mini = 1000
        maxi = 0
        cur = mdates.date2num(datetime.datetime(int(float(fL[0][0])),
                                                int(float(fL[0][1])),
                                                int(float(fL[0][2])),
                                                0,0,0))
    mini = min(float(fL[1]),mini)
    maxi = max(float(fL[1]),maxi)
g.append(cur)
h.append(mini)
i.append(maxi)

plt.plot_date(x=t,y=s,fmt="r-")
plt.plot_date(x=tt,y=ss,fmt="g-")
plt.xlabel("Time")
plt.ylabel("Temperature (#^\circ#C)")
plt.title("Daily")
plt.legend(["today","yesterday"], loc="upper left",prop={"size":8})
plt.grid(True)
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter("%H:%M"))
plt.gcf().subplots_adjust(bottom=0.15,right=0.99)
labels = plt.gca().get_xticklabels()
plt.setp(labels,rotation=90,fontsize=10)
plt.xlim(st,st + 1)
plt.savefig("/var/www/tempr/tg1p.png")

plt.clf()

plt.plot_date(x=weekt,y=weeks,fmt="r-")
plt.plot_date(x=weektt,y=weekss,fmt="g-")
plt.xlabel("Day")
plt.ylabel("Temperature (#^\circ#C)")
plt.title("Weekly")
plt.legend(["this week","last week"], loc="upper left",prop={"size":8})
plt.grid(True)
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter("                     %A"))
plt.gcf().subplots_adjust(bottom=0.15,right=0.99)
labels = plt.gca().get_xticklabels()
plt.setp(labels,rotation=0,fontsize=10)
plt.xlim(weekst,weekst + 7)
plt.savefig("/var/www/tempr/tg2p.png")

plt.clf()

plt.plot_date(x=u,y=v,fmt="r-")
plt.xlabel("Date & Time")
plt.ylabel("Temperature (#^\circ#C)")
plt.title("Forever")
plt.grid(True)
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter("%d/%m/%y %H:%M"))
plt.gcf().subplots_adjust(bottom=0.25,right=0.99)
labels = plt.gca().get_xticklabels()
plt.setp(labels,rotation=90,fontsize=8)
plt.savefig("/var/www/tempr/tg4p.png")


plt.clf()

plt.plot_date(x=g,y=h,fmt="b-")
plt.plot_date(x=g,y=i,fmt="r-")
plt.xlabel("Date")
plt.ylabel("Temperature (#^\circ#C)")
plt.title("Forever")
plt.legend(["minimum","maximum"], loc="upper left",prop={"size":8})
plt.grid(True)
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter("%d %b"))
plt.gcf().subplots_adjust(bottom=0.15,right=0.99)
labels = plt.gca().get_xticklabels()
plt.setp(labels,rotation=90,fontsize=8)
plt.savefig("/var/www/tempr/tg3p.png")
If there's anything in there you don't understand, comment below and I'll try to fill in the gaps.

Uploading the graphs

Finally, I upload the graphs to mscroggs.co.uk/weather. To do this, I set up pre-shared keys on the Raspberry Pi and this server and added the following as a cron job:
 bash 
0 * * * * scp /var/www/tempr/tg*p.png username@mscroggs.co.uk:/path/to/folder
I hope this was vaguely interesting/useful. I'll try to add more details and updates over time. If you are building something similar, please let me know in the comments; I'd love to see what everyone else is up to.
Edit: Updated to reflect graphs now appearing on mscroggs.co.uk not catsindrag.co.uk.
                        
(Click on one of these icons to react to this blog post)

You might also enjoy...

Comments

Comments in green were written by me. Comments in blue were not written by me.
 Add a Comment 


I will only use your email address to reply to your comment (if a reply is needed).

Allowed HTML tags: <br> <a> <small> <b> <i> <s> <sup> <sub> <u> <spoiler> <ul> <ol> <li> <logo>
To prove you are not a spam bot, please type "h" then "e" then "x" then "a" then "g" then "o" then "n" in the box below (case sensitive):

Archive

Show me a random blog post
 2024 

Feb 2024

Zines, pt. 2

Jan 2024

Christmas (2023) is over
 2023 
▼ show ▼
 2022 
▼ show ▼
 2021 
▼ show ▼
 2020 
▼ show ▼
 2019 
▼ show ▼
 2018 
▼ show ▼
 2017 
▼ show ▼
 2016 
▼ show ▼
 2015 
▼ show ▼
 2014 
▼ show ▼
 2013 
▼ show ▼
 2012 
▼ show ▼

Tags

golden spiral datasaurus dozen pascal's triangle realhats latex php christmas card stirling numbers light trigonometry people maths finite group quadrilaterals pythagoras weather station approximation error bars arithmetic interpolation books folding tube maps palindromes logo polynomials coins manchester anscombe's quartet crossnumber propositional calculus pizza cutting errors speed braiding runge's phenomenon data visualisation folding paper games mathsjam pi craft wool dinosaurs misleading statistics geogebra chess computational complexity edinburgh recursion platonic solids dragon curves london underground graphs logic preconditioning video games stickers rugby big internet math-off crochet frobel inverse matrices the aperiodical squares fonts football exponential growth oeis mathsteroids python tennis matrix multiplication mean programming dates game show probability royal baby weak imposition manchester science festival national lottery ternary martin gardner matrix of minors hats harriss spiral geometry electromagnetic field ucl probability fractals numerical analysis flexagons binary matrix of cofactors reuleaux polygons signorini conditions javascript cambridge accuracy advent calendar data final fantasy wave scattering sorting cross stitch convergence gather town puzzles chalkdust magazine nine men's morris estimation rhombicuboctahedron logs draughts numbers live stream zines world cup graph theory countdown talking maths in public mathslogicbot sport matt parker guest posts gaussian elimination newcastle map projections gerry anderson christmas royal institution hyperbolic surfaces turtles noughts and crosses triangles sound fence posts plastic ratio databet london reddit 24 hour maths simultaneous equations captain scarlet matrices chebyshev news menace game of life radio 4 bempp boundary element methods bubble bobble golden ratio machine learning inline code european cup hexapawn bodmas pac-man go pi approximation day hannah fry standard deviation determinants phd statistics tmip finite element method correlation curvature raspberry pi sobolev spaces dataset asteroids youtube a gamut of games

Archive

Show me a random blog post
▼ show ▼
© Matthew Scroggs 2012–2024