Darksky Weather App

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Aha thx this is a different way of notating as I use in the Netherlands. Got the coordinates with the help of google maps and Roco

Gonna give it a try!
I generally use the Met office app and the Google forecast - general but I find accurate. Also use accuweather and Weatherpro and some other weather sites

Don’t know who but I got several ‘crash’ resports with the message that the application doesn’t work. From the description it’s someone who writes Dutch so i assume the person lives in the Netherlands / Belgium. The filled in coordinates are from AFRICA.

be sure to fill in the correct location! So first longtitude next latitude. So in the case of the Netherlands. First the small number, next the big number. Also it can take a while before the device is updated. At maximum a minute.

thinking about adding a validation step that shows the user the location that is specified by name/description.

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Yes had the same problem got told by the app that the weather was Sunny and 24 degrees. It was raining and 12 degrees at that time.
It was indeed the wrong gpsdata entered in the wrong fields, for the last 50 years i have been entering and seeing data as latt/long combinations, but the app uses long/latt combination.
I was not wrong, the app is. After entering the correct gpslong/att the data from the app is correct

How hard is it to read the description of the fields and don’t work on auto pilot?

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Could you pls elaborate on rain data? It just seems not right?
I see a number when it is not raining and vice versa. I see sometimes a number that goes down or up with a steady pace.
Is it current rain cumulative? Related to what? Or is it just the last measurement and would i need a flow to make sure to capture every measurement and count those together?

Darksky reads the rain in mm/h (Millimeters per hour) and only for one hour.
So you get only the current weather data.
If you want more rain data you need a app like “Buien alarm” https://apps.athom.com/app/com.cyclone-software.buienalarm

I use both apps to massure the weather for my sun screens.

Thnx very much. But why do I get readings like I’ll give as an example below!?

For testing I have a flow that shows rain everytime it changes. This gives me often data each couple of minutes (the time between varies) as follows;

0.09
0.08
0.07
0.06

or

0.02
0.03
0.04

Etcetera.

Now, is rain the average of the current hour? Does it start with a new average each hour or is it a sliding window?
How would I go about if I wanted to calculate total rainfall during the last 24 hours?

I use the ‘current’ weather conditions as specified here: https://darksky.net/dev/docs#forecast-request. It depends on the source where the data is coming from how accurate this information is.

Pls explain this:

I think this is not a matter of an inaccurate source, but wrong presentation of data. How would it be possible for rain over a period to become less?

Ehm… that is data darksy receives from a certain source and all the app does is showing this… I don’t know how this van happen. What does this flow show? The current value when it changes? A result of a calculation?

Yes, it shows Rain as soon as it changes. I am testing in order to get the total sum of rain over a period of (the last 24 hours). But this being the data it cannot be used unfortunately.

If this is a flow that returns the current value from the app it is of course possible that rain is fluctuating since it’s the current value. Otherwise the world would be flooded in no time if you know what I mean.

I understand what you mean, but how can it be mm per hour for one hour if it changes every x minutes? So again how am i to read this data? What one hour period? Last? Current? Comming? Is it averaged out over that one hour period for example?

It can? You only need to sum it up in a variable. And after 24 hours reset it. As said this data shows the current predicted rainfall and that can be more or less then the previous measurement… but it will never be negative

Thanks for helping me out with this!

I’ve been reading the API Guide again and did some testing directly from a browser and now I get what happens.
You perform a forecast request and so ‘Rain’ is the current expectation of rain falling in the comming hour. This expectation could vary with each 2-minute call made. And it is NOT telling me how much rain actualy DID fall. Right?
In my case - in order to decide on whether or not to water the garden - I’m looking for total rain that DID fall in the past 24 hours (or maybe some other interval) looking back from the time of the API call. Therefore a so-called time machine request would be required adding up the ‘precipIntensity’ from the hourly data points returned.
Would it be possible for you to add this to the output as an additional field called ‘Rain last 24 hours’ or something?

Regards,
Rick

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I have exactly the same requirment: Rain last 24 hours.
In combination with the rain forcast this would be a very nice feature to determine if the garden needs water or not.

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Sounds like a great addition. I will look into it. Since there are already a lot of options in the current device I’m thinking of adding a new ‘device type’ that will be used to get the ‘timemachine’ request data.

Great! Thanks in advance :slight_smile: