Ambient Weather offers one of the most comprehensive and affordable product suites for weather monitoring. Their popular weather stations aren't just equipped with various weather sensors, but also act as gateways for external indoor and outdoor sensors for soil moisture, pollution, or even pool monitoring.
With this plugin, Ambient Weather users will be able to harness the power of Ubidots dashboards, reporting, alerts, white-label, and end-user management capabilities.
Requirements
An active Ubidots account (IoT Entrepreneur Plan and above)
An active AmbientWeather.net account with at least one Ambient Weather device showing live data.
Table of Contents
Getting AmbientWeather.net credentials
Creating an Ambient Weather plugin
Feedback
1. Getting AmbientWeather.net credentials
Ambient Weather offers an API for you to query your own data. This plugin uses their /devices/ API endpoint in order to query all of the devices in your account using a single request, avoiding excessive requests to their API.
To authenticate such API requests, we will need an API key and an Application Key. To get these keys, go to your AmbientWeather.net account page, scroll down until the "API Keys" section, then click on "Create API Key". Then, click on the one-line disclaimer in the bottom to create an "Application Key":
"Developers: An Application Key is also required for each application that you develop. Click here to create one."
Locate this disclaimer 👆🏻 and get your Application Key👇🏻
2. Creating an Ambient Weather plugin
In your Ubidots account, navigate to "Devices" --> "Plugins" then click on the upper right floating button to create one, and select "Ambient Weather"
Inputs
The plugin receives the following inputs:
Ambient Weather API Key
Ambient Weather Application Key
Ubidots token: Select any of your tokens. This will be used by the plugin to insert data in your Ubidots account.
Interval: How often you'd like to retrieve data from Ambient Weather.
NOTE: Be sure to pick an interval that's equal to or greater than the update rate of your AW sensors. For example, if the data in AmbientWeather.net is showing up every 5 minutes, then the plugin interval should be no less than 5 minutes.
Ambient Weather caps API requests at 1 request/second per API Key, and 3 requests/second per Application Key. Learn more.
Output
Once created, your plugin should start querying the first data points and new devices should appear, with the same names used in AmbientWeather.net:
Each device will have the variables with the respective names and units, as defined in Ambient Weather's Device Data specs:
3. Troubleshooting and Feedback
If no devices show up, please check on your side if the API request to your AmbientWeather.net account is actually working. To do so, type the following URL in a browser:
https://api.ambientweather.net/v1/devices?applicationKey=<YOUR-APPLICATION-KEY>&apiKey=<YOUR-API-KEY>
The following response should appear, with all of your devices data:
If such API request does work, but the data is not appearing in Ubidots, please send us an email at support@ubidots.com with the ID of your plugin, which can be found in the URL of the plugin-edition interface:
If you have any ideas on how we could improve this plugin, we'd be happy to hear them. Please leave us a note at sales@ubidots.com or post it in our community!
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