node-red-node-darksky

node-red-node-darksky

A Node-RED node that gets the weather forecast from the Dark Sky weather API.

Pre-requisites

You will need an API key from Dark Sky developer portal.

This allows 1000 requests per day. The polling node makes a request every 5 minutes = 288 requests.

Install

Run the following command in the root directory of your Node-RED install. This is usually ~/.node-red

    npm install node-red-node-darksky

Usage

Two nodes that get the weather forecast from the Dark Sky weather API.

One node polls the Dark Sky api every 5 minutes, the other is triggered to request weather forecast data when an input is received.

The user has the option of providing a date to the node instead of returning data for the next day. The node will always prioritise the node settings if they are present.

The node is configured using a latitude and longitude set of coordinates, an optional date/time combination, and a set of units with which to format the response.

These can be passed in as settings on the node, or as:

• msg.location.lat, msg.location.lon and msg.time or msg.payload.

If using msg.time it should be a javascript Date object. If using msg.payload it must be a string or number of milliseconds since 1970 (epoch time in mS.)

The node sets the following properties of msg.payload:

Results

Both will return

• weather - a single word representation of the current weather forecast.
• detail - a more detailed explanation of what the weather is forecast to be.
• humidity - a current humidity forecast in decimal (0-1).
• maxtemp - the current forecast max temperature for the location in Fahrenheit.
• mintemp - the current forecast minimum temperature for the location in Fahrenheit.
• windspeed - the current forecast windspeed at the location in metres per second
• winddirection - the current forecast wind direction for the location in degrees.
• lon - the longitude of the location from which the forecast was sourced.
• lat - the latitude of the location from which the forecast was sourced.
• clouds - the current forecast cloud coverage of the location in percent.
• precipitation - the current forecast precipitation chance
• sunrise - the time at which the is forecast to rise in Unix UTC format.
• sunset - the time at which the sun is forecast to set in Unix UTC format.
• units - the units of the returned data, as requested.

The node also sets the following properties of msg.location.

• lat - the latitude of the location from which the data was sourced.
• lon - the longitude of the location from which the data was sourced.
• city - the city from which the data was sourced.
• country - the country from which the data was sourced.

Finally, the node sets:

• msg.time - the time at which the weather data was received by Dark Sky.
• msg.data - the full JSON returned by the API. This is VERY rich...

Weather data Powered by Dark Sky