Author Topic: Alternatives to Ambient Weather and wunderground?  (Read 1694 times)

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Offline WindBlowsLikeHeck

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Alternatives to Ambient Weather and wunderground?
« on: January 29, 2021, 01:02:45 PM »
Does anyone know of a free or inexpensive way to host snapshots from 2 weather cams, associated with a single PWS? Ideally I would like to have the data on that same resource but if not, I could make it work.

I tried Ambient but they only allow one cam per PWS. WU allows more than one cam to be added to a single account but I have had nothing but technical issues in getting even one cam to work. But the deal killer with WU is they do not allow embedding the PWS data/cam on a website. AW makes that simple and if they allowed 2 cams I would be done.

This is a new installation and the goal is to allow the boat club members to go to the club website and view current/historical weather conditions and the weather cams. Two cams are necessary because they will be pointed at a large lake that sits on the confluence of two mountainous drainages so we need to be able to see the storms/weather that can come down either drainage. The panoramic FoV is too wide to be covered by a single camera.

The setup is this: 2 cams behind a router, sending snapshots every 60 seconds to an FTP server. Our website is hosted on the Internet and we have the ability to modify it. I would prefer something like AW or WU that can provide the mashed up data and snapshots that can be embedded in the website but if that is not possible embedding the data from AW and the snapshots from another website that hosts the cams would work.

If that is not practical the remaining option is to embed AW data and send the snapshots to our website. However, that would require writing some cron type scripts to retrieve and display the latest snapshots on a timed basis.

Offline bchwdlks

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Re: Alternatives to Ambient Weather and wunderground?
« Reply #1 on: January 29, 2021, 01:21:44 PM »
Put a Raspberry Pi behind the router with your cameras. It has the capability to retrieve the images and overlay your weather information and then send the results on to your web server.

Look through the WebCam section of this forum. You can find several posts with examples of this being done. I know that I posted one several months ago that retrieves weather data from Meteobridge, an image from a POE bullet camera and resizes the image to meet WU requirements, and then it ftps the results to WU. There have been several other examples posted since then.


Offline 92merc

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Re: Alternatives to Ambient Weather and wunderground?
« Reply #2 on: January 29, 2021, 02:32:37 PM »
You could also go with something like IPTimeLapse.  It's a Windows program if you're not ready for PI.

I believe you can install 2 copies of it to view 2 cameras. It has FTP upload and time lapse video as well.
https://www.BismarckWeather.net
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Offline WindBlowsLikeHeck

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Re: Alternatives to Ambient Weather and wunderground?
« Reply #3 on: January 29, 2021, 03:15:26 PM »
@ bchwdlks - that sounds like more work than making the mods to our webserver. I can already easily embed the weather data on the website and the cameras already send the snapshots at the correct resolution. If I have them send to our webserver instead of a third party service, a cron job can do the rest but I don't know if our customary web person is adept at that so it would fall on me and I would have to learn to code that. Still, the advantage would be that some web programmer could maintain it, remotely.

@92merc - I want to get this going with the minimal amount of equipment because I do not want to be saddled with ongoing support of this project. There is not and will not be a Windows machine at the clubhouse. I may be moving out of the area in the foreseeable future and if so, would no longer be a member of the boat club.

If there is a service (similar to cameraFTP) that handles FTP snapshots and allows embedding, that would be the easy solution for this situation. Does anyone know or have experience with one?

Offline WindBlowsLikeHeck

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Re: Alternatives to Ambient Weather and wunderground?
« Reply #4 on: February 18, 2021, 01:53:26 PM »
Ok, I found what I was looking for at webcam.io which is a webcam hosting site in Germany. Their basic plan is $4.99 USD per month for up to 1500 snapshots/static images per day. I set the cams to upload the FTP snapshots every 2 minutes so I have both cams up for that price.

They have a 7 day trial that does not require giving them a CC number if you want.

My webpage is now fetching the weather info from Ambient and the cam snapthots from webcam.io.

 

anything