Bad Responses for Weather Data

If you happen to see results like this for one of your weather devices, it means that Weather Underground received bad data from its source:

Screen Shot 2014-09-27 at 6.39.22 AM.png (46.22 KiB) Viewed 2819 times

This presents obvious problems for us. A future version of the WUnderground Plugin will attempt to account for such situations--if it detects a "Bad Data Value" it will present something to let you know not to key off the result.

In the interim, it's probably wise for you to provide some form of logic to evaluate WUnderground values of '-999' and '-9999' (which are in the Weather Underground data dictionary as an indicator of bad data) before using the information to do anything important like turning on the heat...

Code: Select all

IF VALUE < -100 THEN (don't do anything really important)

Weather Underground say that they will update bad data values to NULL at some point in the future.

I've discovered an error in the data that's returned for some text-based forecast information. The forecast string data contained within the following states appears to be returned out of order:

Forecast Text - Today indigo.devices[123].states['foreText1']
Forecast Text - Day 2 indigo.devices[123].states['foreText1']
Forecast Text - Day 3 indigo.devices[123].states['foreText1']
Forecast Text - Day 4 indigo.devices[123].states['foreText1']

I don't know yet whether this is also affecting hourly forecast devices. I'm not sure what's causing the problem. Stay tuned.
Dave

Not sure if it was a change in the data that WUnderground was providing, or if yours truly misinterpreted the data dictionary. Regardless, I've rolled out a fix that straightens out the bug and expands the number of fields available for forecast information. I'll put out a separate post which will explain all of the information available for forecasts.

Dave

One thing that might cause a WUnderground Plugin installation to mesbehave is when a Personal Weather Station (PWS) goes offline, or goes away entirely. Recently, my Indigo installation was unhappy because my favorite PWS stopped reporting. This wasn't patently obvious because I was still getting most of the data that I expected to get.

I was routinely missing history data and sometimes missing forecasted highs and/or lows--but was still receiving current conditions. I think that Weather Underground was being nice, and trying to populate what it could based upon the local conditions in the area, so I was still getting plenty of data.

I think I've isolated some information within the API when a PWS has stopped reporting. I will try to add something to the code to test for this condition and report the result back (probably within the onOffState value)if there's a problem.

Stay tuned.
Dave

Plugin updated to address this condition.

viewtopic.php?f=149&t=12482&start=15

Hi Dave,
Can you confirm where the link is to the latest version (v0.7.13).

I found the download in the post WUnderground Plugin Installation and Use.
However, when I go to install it, it says it is upgrading to v0.7.12
Is that the correct location?

Sorry, my bad. Missed a crucial step of putting the new version in the library.

Sorry for the hassle. The newest version is (almost) always here:
https://www.indigodomo.com/library/282/

Dave