[GCARC] Clubhouse temperatures from APRS

[Jon Pearce]

The Skunkworks guys have added a new  capability to the APRS broadcast from the Clubhouse station that will allow remote monitoring of the temperature within the Clubhouse.  The W2MMD-13 APRS station broadcasts the standard weather report that can be seen on the aprs.fi website (and also received by APRS-capable radios like the FTM-400 and FT-series of HTs) , which can be seen by finding W2MMD-13 on that web page and clicking on the blue WX circle near the callsign. That will bring up a popup showing the currently-reported weather from the Clubhouse weather station, but will now also show the temperature in the main, VHF and HF rooms, and also the closet containing the surveillance camera computer and several other electronic devices (we moved most of the networking equipment into the air conditioned VHF room last year). Users can also click on the “show weather charts” or “show telemetry” to see graphs over the last few days of the temperatures. The main, HF and closet temps were incorrect until a few days ago (I fat-fingered the formula for converting Celsius to Fahrenheit) but are correct now.  The variation in VHF room temperature can be seen from the graph – apparently the A/C unit will let it vary by 5 degrees so it continues to cycle between 75 and 80 degrees - we’ll push that temp up by several degrees at our next Clubhouse visit

If anyone is interested, the process for getting this data is pretty cool. The weather station is on a Raspberry Pi computer that records the outdoor weather from sensors connected directly to it. In the main, HF and closet areas there are Pi Zero computers each connected to a BME280 environment monitor that run a short Python program to record the temp and send it via wifi into an Influx database on the WX Pi. That database is used to populate a Grafana dashboard that we use internally to monitor the weather – it’s not available outside of the Clubhouse network but it’s visible to any computers within that network.

To get the data to the APRS station which runs on a different Pi the APRS Pi runs a Python program that sends a query to the Influx database on the WX Pi that returns the most recent temp readings from each of the rooms. That program then writes the temps into a format that Direwolf, the APRS program, can format and send in APRS beacons.

N3PUU and W2LJR have suggested using ESP8266 controllers that cost about $3 each to replace the Pi Zero units so we might be playing around with them over the next couple of months.  If anyone is interested in how all of this stuff works please let me know – we’d be happy to show how we did it and how you can too.

73 de Jon WB2MNF

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