LoxBerry Plugin - Simple Weather Service

Simple weather service is a plugin that can be used to import weather data into the Loxone Miniserver. It requires the dnsmasq plugin installed in the LoxBerry and configured to redirect weather.loxone.com to it. A weatherbit.io API key is required to properly function. The key must later be inserted in the plugin page, and a restart is required.

If you need more functionality, the Weather4Loxone plugin is a great alternative, which also includes its own web visualization.

Motivation

While Weather4Loxone exists (and it's a wonderful plugin!), the idea of this plugin is to bring its configuration to minimum required, and provide a server that runs in the LoxBerry as opposed to a cronjob approach. This ensures that the most up to date weather data is provided to the Loxone Miniserver by the time it is requested by it.

Also, having only one single goal -provide data that can be read by the Loxone Miniserver and shown in its native visualization-, it's easier to focus on high detail for this specific visualization and fine tune the data provided.

Finally, considering the size of the JavaScript community, it seems to be a better choice for long-term maintainability. The non-JS pieces are kept to a bare minimum and made agnostic so that they don't need to be touched.

Code structure

Code is architected following the conventions proposed by the LoxBerry project. The code is divided into the following folders:

• bin: where the service lives. The service is made in JavaScript (Node.js), as opposed to Weather4Lox, which is made in Perl. The service runs as a standalone server, and self restarts if something wrong happens. The JS code is intended to run without requiring any NPM plugin, making it easier and quicker to verify.

• config: configuration file, read and written from the PHP frontend and from the JS code.

• daemon: contains the initialization code that is run by the LoxBerry at startup, and will bring the service to live.

• icons and webfrontend: contains the code used by the LoxBerry to show the configuration pages of the plugin under the web UI. They are developed in PHP and made generic enough so that just by editing the configuration file (data.cfg), new fields will appear.

Service endpoints

The server runs in port 6066, which is the same port where the Loxone Miniserver tries connecting. There are three endpoints exposed in there:

• /forecast: used by the Loxone Miniserver to read the data, which is provided in the format expected by it. The endpoint accepts through query string the coord parameter (in the shape of <lon>,<lat>), expressed in degrees, and the asl parameter (altitude above sea level), expressed in meters. Both parameters are also provided by the Loxone Miniserver.

• /raw: retuns all meteorological data in a JSON structure. This is useful to ensure all fields are properly read and returned from the Weatherbit API. Because their fields and the ones the Loxone Miniserver expects don't match, some logic around re-writing is made. Parameters are the same than the /forecast endpoint.

• /restart: useful for restarting the service. Accepts a code parameter through query string, with the following values:

  • 0: the service finishes cleanly.
  • 254: immediately restart the service.

  Any other code will restart the service after 5 seconds.

Prior art

This plugin is based on the following projects:

• Weather4Loxone
• Inside the Loxone Miniserver
• dnsmasq