HP10 WittCam web camera

[Nossie]

The very bottom left

unless 22/2009 is something completely different

[freddie]

Yes, it's a time stamp. The 22nd at 20:09. Military shorthand for date/time. You see it in TAFs and METARs too.

[Gyvate]

Trying hard to find an alternative that can run on linux as native, I'm not leaving a windows computer on just for the weathercam

you could do as I did - install Windows 11 on a Raspberry-Pi (RPi4B-4GB *) - it runs CMX and WeatherSmartIP software of my Ecowitt WS2320E console 24/7 at very low energy consumption.
*) needs some little tweaking but works perfectly
(I also have another Debian based RPi4B for running weewx)

What I haven't tried yet - maybe some future project - is to check if I can run Ubuntu under WSL2 on that Win11 installation (=in parallel).
Not sure if the ARM64 version of Win11 (for the RPi) supports that. On a normal Windows11 laptop/PC it works perfectly.

[Nossie]

Good idea but I think Win11 would fall over if I tried to do everything I do with this main pi hah

I so have a question you may be able to help with Gyvate

I have motioneye setup to do image and timelapse as seen on the meteo cam dropdown under misc on my website. This updates fine

I can then bake data into the image using curl.

This script works:

Code: Select all

curl http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left="TESTING_PLEASE_STANDBY"  

(I will update this to a local address once I get it working rudimentarily but that will be the next part ) however I have two things.

1. what do you think the best way of getting the information out of CMX? I currently use extra web files to generate the string to a txt file and I'm trying to import that with curl.

2. Although I can get the image to show TESTING_PLEASE_STANDBY - with my limited knowledge of code I'm unable to get it to read the contents of a text file

and I had tried a few things

Code: Select all

pi@Europa:/media/DATA/WeatherServer/MXWeather $ curl http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left="Camdata.txt"
text_left = Camdata.txt
Done
pi@Europa:/media/DATA/WeatherServer/MXWeather $ curl http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left="Camdata.txt"
text_left = Camdata.txt
Done
pi@Europa:/media/DATA/WeatherServer/MXWeather $ curl http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left="/media/DATA/WeatherServer/MXWeather/Camdata.txt"
text_left = /media/DATA/WeatherServer/MXWeather/Camdata.txt
Done
pi@Europa:/media/DATA/WeatherServer/MXWeather $ curl --data "@Camdata.txt"  http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left
curl: (52) Empty reply from server
pi@Europa:/media/DATA/WeatherServer/MXWeather $ curl --data "@Camdata.txt"  http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left=
curl: (52) Empty reply from server
pi@Europa:/media/DATA/WeatherServer/MXWeather $ curl -d "$(Camdata.txt)"  http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left=
-bash: Camdata.txt: command not found
curl: (52) Empty reply from server 
pi@Europa:/media/DATA/WeatherServer/MXWeather $ curl http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left="TESTING_PLEASE_STANDBY"
text_left = TESTING_PLEASE_STANDBY
Done  

No matter what I do I can't get it to accept the contents of the text file

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/159 ... using-curl

[Gyvate]

Good idea but I think Win11 would fall over if I tried to do everything I do with this main pi hah

I don't want to enter the Linux vs. Windows discussion (I'm using both) - but do not underestimate the capabilities of windows, especially when being familiar with the Windows PowerShell ...

Regarding your other question(s):
I'm not an expert in this area, even though I have three webcams (not HP10) running and managed to have their snapshots integrated into the PWSDashboard template by the minute (see my pwsDashboard link in my signature).

I would need to study the matter more deeply to be of help to you here - and time is the limiting factor

I hope/think there are more more-talented people in this area, be it here in this forum or in the wxforum.net.
As this seems to concern the Ecowitt HP10 camera, why don't you post your question in
https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?board=111.0

I'm aware of quite a few users there who do/did some similar exercise with the HP10

[Nossie]

I have pretty good experience with X64 windows 7 and above, although I'm not so happy with Win11 advertising and data sharing ....

apart from that though - last I checked windows for arm was a pretty resource hungry beast and putting 50+ docker containers on it (8GB pi4) I would feel sorry for any un optimized OS - so not a diss at Windows (this time I promise!)

[Nossie]

Hi Freddie
can I ask what your solution was to put your weather tags into motion from cmx? I'm quite sure that mine should work and curl should support receiving text files however for the life of me I can't get anyone to confirm this.

Code: Select all

curl http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left="TESTING_PLEASE_STANDBY"
text_left = TESTING_PLEASE_STANDBY
Done 

The above works fine but multiple variations of the below wont

Code: Select all

curl -d http://192.168.0.168:7999/1/config/set?text_left="$(Camdata.txt)" 

pulling my hair out now hah

[freddie]

Hi Ian,

I do this in my shell script:

Code: Select all

TEXTLEFT=`curl --insecure --silent http://localhost:8181/weather/api/realtime/latest/metar`
TEXTLEFT="${TEXTLEFT// /%20}" #Replace spaces with %20
curl --silent "http://localhost:8080/101/config/set%3Ftext_left=$TEXTLEFT"

The first curl is the retrieval of the weather data from my REST API.
So I think it's the third line you are interested in.

[philpugh]

I have two webcams - Reolink 410W and the HP10 - these are 'associated' with two of my Ecowitt stations. I run three instances of CMX (I have a third weather station) and host my own web server all on the one RPi 4 - 8Gb system. The main camera (410W) - which is not yet permanently mounted outside - is available from my main site from the Misc / Meteocam tabs on my CUtils main page.

The weather text overlay is generated by CMX Extra web files and contains the additional information (placement, text size and colour etc) such that it can be used directly by the convert utility (part of ImageMagick).

I like the 410W because it will - out of the box (nearly!) - do a regular FTP of the latest image at a given frequency - in my case 30secs - directly to my Pi4 system.

I have a BASH script that calls convert (via Python as I had the same problem as Ian had/has passing text strings to some applications directly from BASH) and then decides if the image is to be used to create the timelapse video depending on being one hour before dawn until one hour after dusk - again from an Extra Web file. All images are displayed with the text overlay irrespective of time and at a given time early in the morning another BASH script runs FFMPEG to create the timelapse video - the video uses the original FTP image as the weather overlay is not readable at the frame rate used. It does have the date/time stamp and camera ID provided by REOLINK in their camera firmware.

I have just bought a second 410W (black Friday price nearly half the price of the HP10!) as I am less than impressed with the image quality of the HP10 and the build quality is lacking - IMHO. I have it outside and capture images from it every minute via another BASH script. I need to re-site this as it has quite a wide angle of view and really needs to be in an open space or on a roof acting as a sort of whole-sky camera.