Weatherstation and TE923 USB issues on a Raspberry Pi

I am using Weewx to read data from my weatherstation

But once in a while I have issues:

  • starting the driver / python app
  • after x days no data is being collected (and not being ftp-ed) and a restart does not function

I used the standard release of Weewx 3.5.0

Lucky there is a fanbase and group on google groups where  you can ask questions.

This weekend I upgraded my TE923 driver to  version: 0.18rc8. (meanwhile (22/7) this version is released as 0.18) This version can be found in the github repository and it seems to me that this version is solving some issues I had, but at time of writing I am still testing.

With this new driver I had also to make some changes to that driver and to my Raspberry Pi.

  1. I modified the TE923 Python driver: I commented this line out:
     self.devh.reset()

    (somewhere around line 1530, this caused the message that the USB part was not being claimed by python. (in previous driver versions this was not being reported, so it has to be something in the driver causing this. By commenting this line out, it is making sure that there is no ‘fake reset’ of the usb part. (Note: I did not test what will happen if I am using this line again in combination with the 2nd modification / addition I made).

  2.  and I found a special line for the Raspberry Pi to init the USB for usage with the TE923 driver:

sudo nano -w /etc/udev/rules.d/99-te923.rules

add this line:

ATTRS{idVendor}=="1130", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6801", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev", RUN="/bin/sh -c 'echo -n $id:1.0 > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usbhid/unbind'"

and save it
with

udevadm control --reload-rules
you reload the settings

now stop / start weewx again (/etc/init.d/weewx start / stop / start etc..

Update: 1 week after I wrote this the weatherstation stopped responding again ..
Cause: the SD card had no space left.
here a tip: if you use raspbian, make sure your whole SD card is being used. My Linux install was not extended with the option in the raspbian config. This options allows you to use the whole SD card size

use raspi-config and use the option to expand the filesystem

 

Update 2:

Server has more than 51 days of uptime… and still running smooth

Update 3:

Server is now up for 147 days. Due to some own power stuff and relocations I had to stop it for a while
but still happy that it is running smootly