Couple of questions relating to weather control

[rjalex]

I am so lucky to have a kind neighbour with a great weather station within eyesight of my garden. He has this station on Wunderground with code ILAZIORO38.

http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=ILAZIORO38#history

I have manually input this code in the System->Location dialog and it seems to work with data retrieved but why did this station NOT show when I clicked the location icon and it opened a map with weather stations in the surroundings but not this or other which are nearer ?

Another question is that now that I have input ILAZIOROM38 the web interface says my location is Roma Ciampino which is north of Rome while I live in the southern part of town. Where does that Ciampino string come from ?

Last but not least, will the rain sensor compliance override any weather modification ? In other terms will OS behave like when I only had the sensor on and avoid watering until the sensor is reset ?

Thank you very much.

[Ray]

Regarding the first question, I will leave it to Samer because he is more familiar with the weather station and the UI.

About rain sensor, please check the user manual -> page 14, the answer to question ‘What’s the relationship between Rain Delay, Rain Sensor, and Weather-based Adjustment?’
https://opensprinkler.freshdesk.com/solution/categories/5000022938/folders/5000147083/articles/5000522596-user-manual-firmware-2-1-1-current-

[Samer]

Hi, Regarding the first question: I use a general query to Weather Underground using the documented API calls therefore I am not sure why it doesn’t show up in the popup map. It may be a setting under the weather station on Weather Underground’s website.

For the second issue, the string comes from the city reported by the personal weather station. Reporting “ILAZIOROM38” on the home page doesn’t contribute much other than a jumble of letters and numbers. If this is inaccurate then it’s likely configured wrong (the personal weather station). I have noticed the city can be somewhat incorrect for other weather stations as well and will reexamine for a better way to retrieve the city name.

Thanks!

[rjalex]

Thank you so much Samer. I would PERSONALLY much prefer ILAZIOROM38 (less than one km away from my house) so I’d know where the values come from rather than the wildly inaccurate “Roma Ciampino” (more than 30 kms away) 🙂

If I go on this weather station wunderground page http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=ILAZIORO38 on top you see it says “Spinaceto” and that is the name of my part of Rome (Ciampino is technically not even Rome).

Take care

Bob

[Samer]

I have been working on a solution and at first using the observation location instead of the display location seemed to resolve the issue however it turns out the observation location can be poorly encoded for international countries using UTF-8 characters. Therefore, I have written a small function to parse the GPS coordinates into a location name. For your weather station this becomes: Roma, Lazio.

Does this sound acceptable?

[rjalex]

Hello Samer,
yes Roma, Lazio is acceptable even though not ideal.

If perfecting this further gives you an headache please disregard and focus on other things more important to you and to us ! 🙂

Just in case you’re interested I’ll try explaining a bit more.

As you can see in the attached WUnderground page (which points to the same station I have set in OS) up at the top left you see “Roma, Italy” which is the same string you just stated.

The problem with “Roma” is that’s the name of a large town, but also the name of a so called “Comune” which is an even larger area including some smaller boroughs, and also a “Provincia” which includes many smaller “Comuni” and is a very large area (5,352 km² 🙂 ).

So ideally the string that would be perfect is “Spinaceto” which is a small subsection of the city of Rome (you see it between Roma and Active advisory in the attached picture. Not quite sure as to where it comes from and wether it can be extracted though.

Please also not that for reasons I cannot understand the METAR station in the picture is Ciampino (LIRA) !!! I see no way to customize my wunderground profile and tell it to use LIRF instead (Rome, Fiumicino) which is much closer to my house.

Take care.

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[Samer]

Okay thank you for explaining the structure a little more. Makes complete sense. Unfortunately, your station is one of the few where the observation location is actually more accurate than the geo lookup I’m using. Furthermore, Google doesn’t give the name of Spinaceto however I will see if other location lookup tools work better and go from there.

At least I know I could proceed with this method for now, if need be. Thank you!

[rjalex]

And as an added benefit if you ever come to visit Rome you’ll never get lost ! 🙂

[Samer]

Okay, good news. I have figured out how to properly get the sublocality shown while still using Google Geocoding so I can avoid Weather Underground station names (which contain UTF-8 errors).

Now the future app updates will show: Spinaceto, Lazio. The logic behind the naming is as follows for anyone interested:

1) Grab the observation coordinates of the weather station (this is given to me from Weather Underground)
2) I use Google Geolocate by providing the same coordinates and getting a list of addresses
3) Sort through the results by selecting the first result with a sub-locality (if available) or locality
4) Dissect the address components looking for the sub-locality (if available) or locality and also identify the administrative_level_1 (in the USA this is the state name for Italy this is the main level and for you it’s Lazio)
5) If no administrative level is given, use the country name
6) Combine the (sub)locality and the top administrative level into a comma separated string

Thanks for the data and hope this provides the solution needed. Expect this in 1.4.2.

[Author]

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