Migrating a Project from Weather Underground to Open Weather Maps
The brief but joyous rescue of a project whose original API disappeared behind a paywall.
I am a really big fan of open and free tools; this shouldn't surprise regular readers of this blog. As I started on a recent project I dug up an old piece of code that used the Weather Underground API. Much to my consternation and dismay, my code didn't work. A little digging into the matter brought me to the sad fact that they had closed their API. The screenshot below will give you more detail with regard to this closure.
I have several projects that have used the Weather Underground API in the past, and although you can still use the Weather Underground template - an excellent, citizen-built platform with many private weather stations reporting - access to downloads from the API is now behind a paywall.
I started digging around to see what else was available. I scrolled through a couple options on Google and settled on Open Weather Map.
The API documentation is reasonably good on this website and with a little digging I got a working example going in short order.
My test example uses an ESP8266, and populates temperature pressure and relative humidity into usable variables in the Arduino environment. My test code is linked via GitHub page in this Repository.
You’ll need to sign up to get a key from Open Weather Map.
There are a few other services also available, and here is an excellent Reddit discussion of some of the alternatives.
Let me know what you come up with and I would love to see folks using some of the other weather services available with whatever groovy hardware you choose!
