Hi all,
I need some advice on how to use external sensor data for a calculation.
A bit of an architectural question.
I am retrieving hourly sensor data from a weather api (buienradar.nl) which tells me the rainfall in the previous 24 hours. I want to decide whether to water my lawn based on the total rainfall in the last three days, and the irrigation logic is running in appdaemon.
My question is for advice on storing the data, retrieving it, and making the calculation. Currently I am storing the hourly data in the HA SQLite database, which is fine. What I would need to do daily is to sum the inputs from three of the last sixty-two (or so) records, and use those to decide whether to water the lawn.
Before I start trying to figure out how to access the database from appdaemon, perform some logic on the time stamps, and make a decision, I’d love to get some inputs. Do you think putting them into the db is the best approach; would you use appdaemon to calculate (I also have MQTT running); and do you have any practical advice on how to most easily do this?
I saw an example using “shelve” in python, which makes sense to me. But, to be honest, in the last month I have taught myself C++ for the arduino boards, HA, yaml, python, linux and appdaemon (all completely new to me). The more I can limit the complexity until I have caught my breath, the better.
thats the easy part.
now your sensorvalue gets logged in a file with the time.
now we make an app to get the values you need
import datetime
def init():
checktime = datetime.time(0, 1, 0) # the time you need the value in H M S
self.run_daily(self.cb, checktime)
def cb(...):
sensorlog = open(self.args["/path/to/and_name.txt", 'r') # we read the whole file
lines = sensorlog.readlines() # lines becomes a list with all lines
sensorlog.close() # we got the needed values so close the file
totalvalue = 0
maxlines = 62 # the amount we want to read
linenr = 1 # the startline from the end
do while linenr < maxlines: # so as long as the line is smaller then the amount we want to read go on
lineparts = lines[:-linenr].split(";") # we look in the lines list for the linenr from the bottom and split it in 2 parts
value = float(lineparts[1]) # the second part of the line is the value we need in text so make it a float
totalvalue = totalvalue + value # we add it to total
linenr = linenr + 1 # and we move to the next line
averagevalue = totalvalue/maxlines # we got the values so why not use it
self.set_state("sensor.total_rain", state=totalvalue) # creates and updates the sensor
self.set_state("sensor.avarage_rain", state=averagevalue) # creates and updates another sensor
thats in basic what you need to create 2 new sensors and then you can use that how you like.
by the way i dont try to get all the stuff i use in my head.
i try to remember where i did use the code before and then i look at it and adapt.
most of this stuff is copied from my own apps and then changed for this situation
Usually when you talk about time series data influxdb or graphite comes to mind. But since you don’t have that many samples the HA sqlite will do fine (recorder component). If you want to keep things simple you could use the statistics sensor or the bayesian sensor to do the math for you without having to use appdaemon.
