ECOWITT Weatherstation integration for Home Assistant

Configuration
41

Tonight I set up another Rpi running tcpdump, listening on port 4199. I went to the WS View APP and set the “custom” server to point to this new RPI, and I am receiving POST messages every 16 seconds (which matches the config in WS View) from the correct IP address for the WS1000. So, I conclude that the WS1000 is sending messages correctly.

I guess this means that there is some issue with the messages getting from my Home Assistant external port to the Integration. I’m going to have to think about this a bit. But at least the problem doesn’t appear to be with WS View/WS1000.

42

And as a further test, I SSH’ed into Home Assistant and ran a small web server with:
python3 -m http.server 4199

And no traffic is coming through. So, it seems that somehow the packets from the WS1000 are not getting to the correct docker container for Home Assistant. I need to do some more research to try to figure this out…

43

Now this is a real grasp at straws but in order to get my ZWave USB stick to work I had to make root and my HA user a member of the dialout group. This is some hangup from days of old.

When I was building mine @Harry13 sent me this

Running the deCONZ Container

Pre-requisite

Before running the command that creates the deconz Docker container, you may need to add your Linux user to the dialout group, which allows the user access to serial devices (i.e. Conbee/Conbee II/RaspBee):

sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER

Worth a try

44

Thanks for this idea. I’ve decided to delay troubleshooting on this for now. The reason is that I’ve been running Home Assistant in an “unsupported installation.” It was supported in 2017 when I first installed it, but since last year it has been “unsupported.” Anyway, I’ve been thinking about upgrading to a new NUC to run HA. Yesterday a Security Bulletin was issued which strongly recommends upgrading to the new Core, but I can’t do this because my system is unsupported. So, bottom line is I finally ordered a new NUC and will install HassOS instead of running in Linux. My suspicion is that once I’m running in this environment the Ecowitt integration will work (since it seems to have worked for everyone else). I’ll report back if this is not the case!

45

Unsupported installation…
This is an interesting "statement.
I am running mine on a NUC-i3 with UBUNTU 20.04 which is an unsupported installation according to the supervisor panel and mine works but I think you are probably going down the right path.
image
If mine fails then I will have to do a rebuild but that’s a lot of work.

I upgraded to new core 2021.1.3 this morning

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46

Right. For me, it won’t let me update the Core. I thought it was because I was “unsupported” but maybe it is because I am “unhealthy” as well:

Screen Shot 01-15-21 at 04.52 PM

It seems that I am unhealthy because my Supervisor is not privileged. I tried to run the convenience script to reinstall upgrade the Supervisor and some of the dependencies failed to load correctly.

At that point (into the wee hours of the morning) I decided that this was all too much work to try to band-aid a system that clearly has some installation issues going back many years. The solution is to do a fresh install, but I’m running on an ancient (ca 2008) laptop with a hard drive of unknown provenance. This was fine when HA was something I was just “playing around with”, but at this point it’s really become a valuable asset to our home and worthy of some additional investment.

So, I ordered a new NUC i5 with a 512 GB hard SSD drive and 16 GB of RAM. I’m going to dedicate this unit just to HA, so I plan to install HassOS to hopefully provide a more resilient solution in the future. Hopefully it will work for many years to come.

We’ll see…

Glad to know from you that the NUC works well. I’m looking forward to getting mine.

47

Supervisor not privileged? Sounds to me like it does not have root privilege? But I am no expert on that.

I am running a genuine Intel NUC i3 with 8GB Ram and 2 x 256GB SSD. I find that this works quite well.

Current Stats on resources.

image

I have a few serial devices

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I also monitor 6 surveillance cameras using ONVIF. This is only a quick view as the main system is on my Synology NAS.

Of course there is the hookup with my Ecowitt HP2551 display

So as you say the HA is quite a useful tool in my house too.

I think you will be very pleased with your NUC!

48

Strange things.
FYI
This morning my SUPERVISOR reported that is was not only an unsupported installation but that it was UNHEALTHY as well****
I had done nothing since yesterday apart from viewing the UI.

I had read the learn more on the supervisor panel and it told me my docker needed to have the file daemon.json

{
    "log-driver": "journald",
    "storage-driver": "overlay2"
}

added to /etc/docker**

I did this (as root so that it owned the file), went to the console of my nuc, did the latest upddates for ubuntu and rebooted my nuc.

The unhealthy notice went away.

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From what I have read any OS that’s not debian is unsupported and hence the error.
However the unhealthy and not privileged error went away.

Simple thing to change if you want to try.

49

Thanks for the follow-up on this. As I mentioned the other day, with the latest security warning and the “unhealthy” and “unsupported” notifications that are starting to affect upgradeability (sp?), I decided to dedicate a NUC to HA. I purchased a new (well, reconditioned) NUC5i5RYK and received it yesterday. The installation of Hassio was a) not as easy as I hoped, and b) not as hard as I feared, so I guess it went OK.

Now that I am fully compliant (I think) with the most-supported installation with full Hassio and nothing else running on the NUC, upgrading the Core and Supervisor was not problem at all.

I’m pleased also to report that Ecowitt started working immediately. So the problem with my previous installation is clearly related to some issue with getting data from port 4199 on my old host system into the appropriate docker container for Ecowitt. I’m not much of a Linux/Docker guy, so I can’t help anyone who might experience similar problems in the future.

Like you, @rontaylor, I’ve got a pretty extensive suite of “stuff” being orchestrated by Home Assistant (currently, 36 switches/lights, 11 window shades, my garden irrigation (using a custom-built MQTT-based irrigation system), my pool chemistry (another custom MQTT-based sensor/pump system), presence sensors (using BLE), Ecobee thermostats (x3), MQTT fridge temp and ambient indoor temp from a vacation home, MQTT fridge and freezer temp from my beer fridge in the garage and now weather from the Ecowitt).

I don’t even want to think about how much $$$ I’ve spent on all of this (and please also don’t tell my wife :smile:), and it seemed that with this investment in other stuff that continuing to run the “brains” on a used laptop from 2008 was asking for trouble.

Hopefully the NUC will perform well and last for a long time. So far, all but one integration is working, and the remaining one I think just needs a reinstall. So, all’s good now. Currently my Core CPU utilization is 0.6% and my Supervisor 0.3%. Total memory for Core and Supervisor is 2.5% (although this will grow as I decided to wipe out my database and start fresh last night), and my SSD is 8% full, so I guess I’m not really working my new system too hard!

2 Likes
50

Hi all, I would like to buy an Ecowitt HP2553.
Is it compatible with this integration? (Yes / No / Only with an additional GW1000)

Thanks in advance

51

Hello Riky,
I have the HP2551 and it works with that.
I think it will work with the HP2553 as the upload to ecowitt should be the same and therefore the upload to HACS as well but I am only guessing.

52

Thanks rontaylor.
If I proceed with the purchase I’ll keep you updated.

53

I don’t see LUX value either, even though Ecowitt is configured for that.

54

As an FYI, the ambient weather sensors seem to be compatible with the ecowitt. I bought an ecowitt to work with plant moisture sensors and it automatically picked up my ambient weather weather station data. Also ecowitt moisture sensors were out of stock so I ordered one from ambient weather, no issues.

55

Yep, it is, that’s why I bought mine to get off the cloud api for AWS, because it’s unreliable.

56

Hey crazy question, if I get more than one gateway so I can have more moisture sensors, how would I add two gateways? That wouldn’t like, break anything would it?

57

I would guess you need to define different ports on your HA to send the Ecowitt string and add a second device to the integration.

I haven’t tried it, but guessing.

58

Makes Sense. I’ll try changing the port and setting up another version of the integration after doing a full backup and see what happens :man_shrugging:

1 Like
59

I am interested in using a wh41 pm2.5 outdoor sensor with a gw1000 which is connected to my rpi4 hassio. I understand this sensor only checks air quality every 10mins - suggesting the intake fan only spins up and processes the sucked in air at those intervals. Apparently this creates a problem as dust particles accumulate within the interval and affect sensor accuracy. Does anyone use this sensor? Is there any potential workaround to the interval to force it to run more frequently (with external power for eg, turning off and on, firmware updates)? Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

60

I’ve got both a WH41 and a WH43, both are connected to a GW1000 and an HP255x and both report on to Home Assistant with no problems (I must get around to removing the duplication). The outdoor monitor has performed well compared with the closest official government tracking stations here in Sydney where we’ve had bushfire smoke due to burning off over the last week.

Where have you seen reports of particle accumulation and accuracy problems?