5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Rules to query the Open Weather API
Set this up the other day and its working great. I have it on a 2x2 tile and have realized that the future days forecast is too small on my tablet and would prefer to just see the current temp in large font, the day’s forecasted high/low, rain % and wind speed on a 2x2 tile so that the current temp could be seen from 4’ to 6’ away on my 7" tablet and the other details visible as walking out the door to know if we need to grab a coat for the day or an umbrella. Simlar sizing to the 2x2 date/time tile. Would also prefer it to follow my dashboard theme for a cohesive design. Does anyone have the code for this already? I tried looking at the code for this tile and immediately knew it was gonna be an excessive number of manhours for me fumbling through trying to modify it.
This is great. Works well.
Just out of curiosity, do we know what the “2” in a mustard color box next to “Feels Like” Means?
It’s air quality index.
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Yes, it’s AQI. And the Air Quality Index only shows up if you check the box for it in the tile’s settings, so you can uncheck it if you don’t want to see.it.
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Doh! Thanks. Had that turned on. Now that I know what it is, I will keepit.
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How often does the Weather Tile update? The current temperature is often not current. If I go to another dashboard and come back, it updates.
Every 3 hours by default.
You could modify the number set at the very top of your Custom Tile code if you wanted a faster refresh. Just keep in mind that a faster refresh could put you over your API limits.
Doing a quick “back of the napkin” math, even with the lower 1000 free API calls for the 3.0 version of the Open Weather API, if you had it set to every 10 minutes, that would be 144 calls per displayed tile in a day
(24 × 60) ÷ 10 = 144
So if you had a single weather tile on 5 different displays, that would be 720 API calls to the One Weather API each day.
Of course, that assumes you aren’t using the API key elsewhere (like in a Hubitat driver) that would be increasing the API call, but you get the idea.
Edit: And if you enable AQI in the tile settings, that requires a separate API call, so it would double the number of API calls.
Thank you for the quick reply.
I only have the weather on my main display so I decided to try 5 minute updates. Which should work out to 288 calls (24*60/5) with no air quality display. So, at line 12, REFRESH_INTERVAL =5*60*1000; //5 minute in ms
I’ll let you know if I have any issues.
Thanks again.
Don’t know what happened with the formatting. That should be 288 calls (24x60/5) and refresh of 5x60x1000.
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I edited the post for you to fix the formatting. Wrapping text in single asterisks turns it into italics.
If you want to format text as raw/code, you can highlight it and then tap the </> button on the editor toolbar to format it accordingly.
I see you were responding via email, you you can also do it by wrapping your formatted string in backticks:
`your * formula * or code`
Becomes 
your * formula * or code
Okay, thanks for all that.
In a previous post you stated I’m tempted to drop the H/L value from the current day when not using the ‘OneCall’ endpoint as I think the indicator could be confusing – thoughts?
Don’t think you had any responses to that, however, I agree it is confusing. Is there a way to drop that?
I just pushed an update to the tile to address this. Try updating your custom tile and let me know if it works better:
There’s a few changes in this release:
- Current Day High/Low Improvements:
I’ve added in a fallback to Open Meteo which is another free weather source which has a ‘forecast’ for the current day. (Only applies when using the “2.5 Multi” setting) - Configurable Refresh Interval
There’s now a configurable refresh interval setting in the tile rather than you having to edit the interval manually - Fixed High/Low “2.5 Multi” Forecast Issues
This was impacting both the ‘today’ forecast as well as the weekly forecast wherein values over 100 were causing the high/low values to be invalid
Current Day High/Low Improvements:
This appears to work. I see different values depending on what weather service provider I look at for the forecast, but the tile numbers appear to be in the range. Will monitor and let you know if there are any issues.
Configurable Refresh Interval:
This is a nice feature. I entered a refresh rate of 5 minutes which I think is reasonable for my application (see previous discussion above), however I got a warning banner (refresh interval faster than 10 minutes is not recommended) coming up. It continues to come up every time that dashboard is loaded which is annoying, so I put it to 10 minutes. I can live with 10 but would prefer 5 as it then closely matches our local temperature display and then I don’t have to field questions about why they don’t match and get into explanations of polling rates, etc.
Most weather services have a minimum refresh interval, so going beyond that won’t improve anything as its still returning the same data during that interval.
In the case of the Open Weather Map API, the data is refreshed every 10 minutes at best.
“First, we recommend making API calls no more than once in 10 minutes for each location, whether you call it by city name, geographical coordinates or by zip code. The update frequency of the OpenWeather model is not higher than once in 10 minutes.”
Okay, 10 it is then. Everything else looks good. I appreciate the modifications.
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Current Day High/Low Temperature looks good. Is it possible to add Relative Humidity (RH%) to Current Day?
Yes, I suspect it’s possible.
I’m not sure where the most appropriate place to display it would be though as the ‘today’ section is already getting cluttered and it would definitely need to be optional. Taking a look at screenshots of several popular weather apps, it doesn’t looks like humidity is commonly included, so there’s not a good rule of thumb to go by either.
The sample you are showing looks good. Not sure what’s involved in adding that, and it’s in the “nice to have” category, but if it’s not too much effort, I think it would be a good addition.