Tempest Weather showing wrong pressure value

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1

It appears that the Tidbyt Tempest weather station app is showing the station pressure value rather than the more common sea level pressure.

Currently my tidbyt is showing 24.791 which is the station pressure converted, while the tempest website shows 29.385 which would be the sea_level_pressure of 991.5 converted to inches of mercury.

Is there github repo we can create pull requests to update this?

Here is the data from the Weatherflow API

 "obs": [
    {
      "timestamp": 1640877333,
      "air_temperature": -10.7,
      "barometric_pressure": 839.5,
      "station_pressure": 839.5,
      "sea_level_pressure": 995.1,
      "relative_humidity": 75,
      "precip": 0,
      "precip_accum_last_1hr": 0,
      "precip_accum_local_day": 0,
      "precip_accum_local_yesterday": 0,
      "precip_minutes_local_day": 0,
      "precip_minutes_local_yesterday": 0,
      "wind_avg": 0.2,
      "wind_direction": 22,
      "wind_gust": 0.4,
      "wind_lull": 0.1,
      "solar_radiation": 2,
      "uv": 0,
      "brightness": 248,
      "lightning_strike_last_epoch": 1633556648,
      "lightning_strike_last_distance": 32,
      "lightning_strike_count": 0,
      "lightning_strike_count_last_1hr": 0,
      "lightning_strike_count_last_3hr": 0,
      "feels_like": -10.7,
      "heat_index": -10.7,
      "wind_chill": -10.7,
      "dew_point": -14.3,
      "wet_bulb_temperature": -11.5,
      "delta_t": 0.8,
      "air_density": 1.11431,
      "pressure_trend": "steady"
    }

Screenshot from the Tempest Station Website

image
image1120×589 28 KB

Also the Tidbyt shows the temperature as 24.0 with the 0 while the actual temperature is 24.4 (-4.2 C → 24.4 F). I think you should either show the decimal point not zero’d or remove it entirely.

1 Like
2

Noticed the same things. Happy to help debug and test a resolution.
I think the temperature should be presented with a decimal as shown on the station grid page, not rounded to a whole number.

2 Likes
3

Same here. I came here to post about it and see I’m not alone. I’m happy to help test, too.

FWIW, I have four different WeatherFlow stations with a different combination of sensors on each one. Maybe in time the app can be expanded to select different sensors from a given station, much like station selection is done now.

4

Hey all, taking a look now.

The plan is to open source this applet to allow pull requests, but there’s a few more things we have to wrap up to make public any apps that authenticate with 3rd-party services.

4 Likes
5

@rohan Just curious, once you push a fix for this app what does that update process look like? Does the device check for app updates every day or every few hours?

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6

While you are at it, here is another formatting thing to fix, the pressure value does not show trailing zeros.

Screenshot_20220104-230555_Photos
Screenshot_20220104-230555_Photos1438×1076 597 KB

Screenshot_20220104-193541_Tempest
Screenshot_20220104-193541_Tempest972×3222 264 KB

Maybe the best for pressure is to round to the second decimal place and pad with training zeros as needed. In this example pressure should display as 29.30 (at least until sea level pressure is displayed in which case it should read 29.78), and as @CountRushmore mentioned, temperature should read 41.5°.

PS. maybe this should be a feature request, but it would be great if when it was raining, the rain would either animate or blink. Also, maybe if there is room to put the pressure change indicators as a single character after the pressure value then the line below could show accumulated rain for the day.

2 Likes
7

@CountRushmore Once we deploy a fix, it’s fixed for everyone within a matter of a couple minutes.

Unfortunately this is taking me longer to figure out than I’d hoped. We’ve spun up a community repo (currently in beta) where I’m hoping to move some apps like this one.

1 Like
8

The more I have lived with this app there are two changes I would like to see when the pressure is corrected:

  1. Format station pressure to 3 decimal points when set to inHG including the zeros when necessary (example 29.000)

  2. Include the fraction of temperature where possible. So instead of showing 1.0 when the temperature is 0.6 show 0.6. Right now it all seems rounded to the nearest whole number and always shows zero as the fraction.

1 Like
9

@rohan Any progress in fixing or getting this app moved to a place we can contribute fixes to it?

10

It took a lot longer than I’d hoped but the code is now public:

Any community pull requests that get merged in will be deployed to all Tidbyt users.

11

@rohan Thanks for getting that merged. Now that it is in the community repo what is the process for that update becoming live and reflecting on the Tidbyt?

12

Thanks for the fix! We normally deploy from the community repo to production a couple times a day. Unless there is a test failure this should be live by the end of the day.

1 Like
13

After asking in the WF forum, did this merge mean the pressure is fixed?

14

@GizmoEV Yes, and as of right now I’m seeing it correct.

2 Likes
15

Thanks again for the fix! If I’d known it was really just 10 characters I would have fixed it long ago :person_facepalming:

2 Likes
16

With regards to the lack of decimal precision on temperature that is going to be a deeper issue.

The forecast call which is used now does all the unit conversions to the local (Fahrenheit vs Celsius for example, but unfortunately just returns whole numbers.

/observations/station/{station_id} however gives more detail but returns all the data in one standard unit. Celsius for temperature for example. It does however provide the stations expected units so we know if we need to convert and what to convert to.

But we would need to write some untility code to convert C to F as well as MB to to the various pressure units.

The observations call seems to be missing current conditions (sunny, cloudy, etc) so that would be an issue as well.

Probably best to contact Tempest and see if they can provide an all in one endpoint that gives us more what we want. They would probably be interested anyway since the forecast call returns a lot more data than we need.

1 Like
17

This appears to be happening again. My Tidbyt is started showing temperature as nn.0° and a barometric pressure that is a full inch below the actual (currently showing 29.235 vs actual 30.276).

Also - is there a reason the pressure trend needs to show three of the same symbol instead of just one? It takes up a lot of space that could probably be used for something more informative.

1 Like
18

I just checked mine. Temp, humidity & wind match but pressure is different.
My Tempest shows 30.433 and the Tidbyt is displaying 30.112

I looked at the Tempest history and the pressure was near 30.112 about 22 hours ago 11pm ET last night.

19

Ok @sinclaj1 , I see what is happening.

When I view my Tempest’s data on the Tempest site (my site is at Tempest ), the pressure that the Tidbyt is showing is not the pressure we normally view which is Sea Level Pressure (30.439 for me at the time of this post) but the Station Pressure (30,.115 for me at the time of this post). I see the station pressure listed if I scroll down a little on the page I listed earlier in this post. You can replace my station id with your station id and you should see your values.

When I took a quick look at the source code that we have access to at community/tempest.star at main · tidbyt/community · GitHub it I didn’t see why station pressure is getting picked up, I will look more tomorrow to see if I notice any reason.

20

My Tidbyts are also showing the nn.0 temperature again and also station pressure rather than sea-level pressure.