Possible drop in replacement for Fantastic Weather plugin

Quick question on Pirate Weather - it says that they use the same structure as Dark Sky (blurb from the website below). Wondering if it really would be that simple to point at Pirate Weather with the Fantastic Weather plugin?

This API is designed to be a drop in replacement/ alternative to the Dark Sky API, and as a tool for assessing GFS and HRRR forecasts via a JSON API. This solves two goals:

It will also allow legacy applications to continue running after the Dark Sky shutdown, since as Home Assistant Integrations, Magic Mirror cards, and a whole host of other applications that have been developed over the years.
For anyone that is interested in knowing exactly how your weather forecasts are generated, this is the "show me the numbers" approach, since the data returned is directly from NOAA models, and every processing step I do is documented. There are lots of existing services that provide custom forecasts using their own unique technologies, which can definitely improve accuracy, but I'm an engineer, so I wanted to be able to know what's going into the forecasts I'm using. If you're the sort of person who wants a dense 34-page PowerPoint about why it rained when the forecast said it wouldn't, then this might be for you.
I wanted to provide a more community focused source of weather data. Weather is local, but I'm only in one spot, so I rely on people filing issues to help improve the forecast!

Link to site
https://pirateweather.net/

Possibly, but I do have some reservations:

- It's a student-run project who's "AWS credits run out in June",
- I tried to look at the API, but keep getting a spinning wheel, and
- I tried to sign up for an account but got a "daily email limit" error (their limit not mine).

So for the time being, there's no way for me to get any further. It appears that this project might be run on a shoe-string budget.

Thanks - it sure would be nice to keep fantastic weather alive, especially if it was easy to do, maybe they are having problems because an article came out about them and their web set up is experiencing too high a volume right now - looks like I’m back to looking out the window soon

Tried again to sign up for this and got another "exceeded daily email limit" error.

They are either being overrun with traffic or their system is not very robust.

I’ll try today and see if I get the same problem - if so I’ll try to contact him - I think I remember a listed email….

Got this back but have not tried it yet…

Hi,

Thank you for reaching out- home automation systems are exactly what I had in mind when I put this together, so it’s great when other people investigate using it for that.

This was an issue with thee deluge of users that signed up yesterday. I ran a fair bit of load testing against the API itself, but never thought to test the developer portal. The good news is that I’ve requested and received an increase in the e-mail limit from AWS, so it should be working now!

Let me know if you run into any other issues or if there is anything else I could help with here.

Thanks,
Alexander

Working now (once I created account )- just not 100% sure if I should do something or wait?

I've also been able to get an account. I'm looking at it now.

It appears the api may be a faithful recreation of the Dark Sky api. Here is what I did to test it out. Within the Fantastic Weather plugin.py file, I changed the api call from this:

Code: Select all

                f"https://api.darksky.net/forecast/{api_key}/{latitude},{longitude}?"
                f"exclude='minutely'&extend=''&units={units}&lang={language}"


to this:

Code: Select all

                f"https://dev.pirateweather.net/forecast/{api_key}/{latitude},{longitude}?"
                f"exclude='minutely'&extend=''&units={units}&lang={language}"


and then reloaded the plugin. This URL is located at line 932 of the plugin.py file (depending on your version of the plugin).

Within the Fantastic Weather plugin settings, I changed my Dark Sky api key to my Pirate Weather api key (you can see your Pirate Weather api key on your Pirate Weather "My Dashboard").

From the plugin menu, I selected "Refresh Data Now" and each of my weather devices cycled without any errors (I didn't inspect the individual weather device states).

An important distinction between the two services: the Pirate Weather api appears to limit api calls to 20,000 calls per month (the dashboard seems to show the limit is 30,000) -- I don't recall off the top of my head what the Dark Sky limit is (was). The Fantastic Weather plugin does nothing to prevent you from over-running your api limit.

I'm not making any promises to port the plugin to the Pirate Weather api and (obviously) I can't support any problems folks might have when using their service--but this shows that the potential is there.

Clarification of one point above.

The plugin has an api call limiter in the plugin preferences, but it's possible to set that limit above what the api service allows.

Thanks - I’ll try it this week

I have been using the Pirate Weather drop-in for a few weeks and it seems to work great. I get the once in a while "could not make successful connection" but not any more often than with Dark Sky. It is very helpful that this is a true drop-in replacement with zero adjustments that need to be done to any of my control pages and devices. Everything works just like before. Just change the URL as mentioned before and you are ready to go. 20,000 API calls per month are included in the free subscription, which should be plenty. The developer of the API has a nice website at https://pirate-weather.apiable.io that explains it all.

Glad to hear that this is a potentially viable alternative. The Fantastically Useful Weather Utility (Fantastic Weather for short) still hanging in there.

Just a reminder for those still using the plugin with Dark Sky, judgment day is nigh.

I've been seeing inconsistent results with the Pirate Weather alternative to Dark Sky. Yesterday, it predicted the daily high temperature at 81ºF and it was closer to 60º. Today's forecast summary and chance of precipitation don't match up. It also says it's currently raining and I'm looking at bright sunshine.

I only use weather data for information -- not for automation -- so it's not a huge deal; but folks that do may want to pay attention.

There is a bug in the Pirate Weather API regarding the Daily High Temperature. In particular the current day temperatureHigh switches ( between around 7 pm and 1 am) to the highest temperature in the forecast for the following week. A temporary workaround is to use current day temperatureMax. The plugin does not support Max and Min temperatures but it is easy to modify the plugin.

There are also issues and concerns how High and Low are determined. It looks like the Daily High is constantly changing throughout the day and is actually the forecasted High from now until the end of the forecast period and not the highest temperature of the day.

You can read about this at
https://github.com/alexander0042/pirateweather/issues/23

https://github.com/alexander0042/pirateweather/issues/5