As part of this journey, I hooked up my Raspberry Pi to a Sense hat, and used ThingSpeak to log the data. I lucked into finding this detailed tutorial, which helped me track my home's temperature and humidity levels (although I had to remove some strange characters in the code before it would compile properly).
I also completed Raspberrypi.org's Fetching the Weather exercise, to learn how to access data from a nearby Raspberry Pi Weather Station. I was surprised that the nearest RPi weather station is in Quebec, Canada; I was hoping to find a school in Vermont that was using one.
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| Weather data from Canada using a Raspberry Pi Weather Station |
This discovery led me down a path that was unrelated to my Python exploration, but splendidly related to weather data. Finding it hard to believe that the nearest weather station was in Canada, I stumbled upon the Weather Underground API, which connects to weather data in my home town. This prompted me to do a deeper dive to better understand how I might use that data, perhaps in combination with a Photon microcontroller, as part of an art project I was working on.
To make a long story short, I signed up for a Weather Underground account and was given an API key that allowed me to tap into JSON data using a dedicated channel that I created on ThingSpeak! While I still have a lot to learn, I was able to use the MATLAB analysis feature (which allows you to "Get Data From a Webpage") to harvest weather conditions by typing in a unique URL containing my API key. I was then able to record things like wind velocity and temperature. This meant that I could use data ranges that I specified to trigger functions on my Photon! I know this is dorky, but the learning curve has been exhilarating!
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| A smattering of JSON data that may be harvested through Weather Underground |
