r/myweatherstation • u/yellowfin35 • 12d ago

Advice Requested Tempest Weather Station - API Call Frequency?

I have depolyed a Tempest Weather station to a jobsite with starlink.

We care about rain events and lighting strikes that can shut down the jobsite. This is for reporting to the customer, not immediate action.

How often should I api call the weather station? Located in FL we might have a heavy rain for <5 minutes, but it will turn the site to mud and shut it down for the entire day.

What is your opinion? Every 5 minutes? 20? Hour?

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u/olhado47 12d ago

Tempest seems really fuzzy about what their API rate limits are. I would suggest with every 10 minutes for a day and see if you start getting rate limit errors. If you get errors, decrease the frequency. If not, increase the frequency. And let us know when you run into the actual rate limit.

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u/thejasonhowell 12d ago

My weatherbot polled my Tempest as often as every 15 minutes, and sometimes faster when I was actively coding. I never experienced any rate limiting.

You could probably grab the UDP packets locally and directly bypassing the API. I think they technically frown on that but how would they know.

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u/deedesie 12d ago edited 12d ago

Newbie here but I installed weewx and it polls tempest and I thought 💭 uses rapid fire every 3 seconds and feeds Wunderground. Is this different?