In 2023 I posted “Creating a “console” for my WeatherFlow Tempest with a Facebook Portal.” Unfortunately, less than a year after that, Facebook bricked the portal with respect to the Duet app, so that no longer worked.
Last year I came up with another solution and just not had the time to post it until now.
REMEMBER: The easiest way to view your Tempest weather station’s data in real time is to use the app, then click on the “weather station” icon in the upper right. This will provide you with a real-time display. Just watch your wind speed; on a breezy day it should change every couple seconds. I’ve seen cases where the display “freezes” and I’m not sure why.
That said, if you don’t have a spare phone or tablet and you want to have a display dedicated to the Tempest, you can do it on the Amazon Echo Show 5 or 8-inch model. Here’s what it looks like on the 8-inch:
There is one catch. The Alexa Silk browser times out after 5 minutes. If you open the silk browser (say “Alexa, Open the Silk Browser”) on the Echo device and type in your Tempest grid URL
https://tempestwx.com/station/XXXXX/grid where XXXXX is your tempest number
Alexa will display the grid, and it will refresh, but eventually the Echo will revert to the home screen.
To avoid that, you need to make use of this Keep Alexa Open Javascript code and put that code, ad that and an iframe to your Tempest grid, into an HTML page and store it on a website where Alexa can retrieve it.
If that sounds complicated, never fear, I have designed a simple PHP script on my website that should do that for you. Open the silk browser (say “Alexa, Open the Silk Browser”), click in the address bar, and enter this link:
https://www.weatherwatchers.org/wxmaps/tempest.php?tempest=XXXXX
where XXXXX is your tempest number that you see on the TempestWx website.
NOTE: The Echo Show will eventually kick you out of the web browser if it reboots after an update or has an important notification to display. In my use, it only does this after a day or two. To get it back, open the silk browser (say “Alexa, Open the Silk Browser”). It will either take you back to the weather station display, or, worst case it will show a list of recent websites. Just click on “weatherwatchers” which will take it back to the link above.
TIP: To make the display look even better, press and drag your finger downward in the black web page, just below the blue navigation bar. This will display the grid full-screen and you can center on what part you like best. I typically display the first five bars of the grid — temperature, pressure, lightning and wind, but scroll it down a little so that you don’t see the “Buy a weather station” navigation at the top.
If you’d rather host the code for your grid only, on your own web server, here it is:
<HTML><HEAD>
<script defer src="https://dagammla.gitlab.io/keep-silk-open/keep.js">
</script>
<TITLE>TEMPEST</title>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<br/>
<iframe src="https://tempestwx.com/station/XXXXX/grid" width="960" height="740" border="0" scrolling="yes" allowfullscreen="yes">
</div>
</BODY></HTML>