Time-Series Data Daemons

influxDB and Grafana

InfluxDB and Grafana are great tools for storing and displaying (respectively) time-series data. There are many great tutorials available around the web. If you are using a Raspberry Pi as your server you coudl start here: https://simonhearne.com/2020/pi-influx-grafana/.

Data Collection Daemons

This is where I will collect the list of my data collection daemons. There are two categoreis:

• those aimed at Amateur Radio Operators.
• those aimed at a general audience.

Amateur Radio

APRS Weather Aggregator.

This is a daemon which connects to an APRS_IS protocol backbone, registers a data acquisition filter¹ to request packets within a specified radius of a location (usually the home QTH). The daemon decodes weather packets and aggregates the data weighting each packet according to the distance from the indicated location. Each time a new weather packet arrives, a new aggregation is computed and sent as a measurement to the configured influxDB.

Availability

The daemon is available as a compiled binary for armhf and amd64 architectures in Debian packages from my Repository. Once the repository is configured on your system the daemon may be installed with: sudo apt install aprs_wx

This is a systemd service which you may:

• start: sudo systemctl start aprs_wx
• stop: sudo systemctl stop aprs_wx
• derermine status: sudo systemctl status aprs_wx
• enable to start at boot: sudo systemctl enable aprs_wx
• disable from start at boot: sudo systemctl disable aprs_wx

Operation is controlled by a configuration file located at:

/usr/local/share/APRS_WX/config.txt

A shadow configuration file located at:

/usr/local/share/APRS_WX/config.pkg

is also installed and upgraded as the configuration options change.

Configuration options

callsign:

Specifies the amatuer radio callsign of the person responsible for running the daemon. This is used to authenticate to the APRS_IS server. The default value begins with _N0CALL_ which indicates the configuration has not been customized.

passcode:

The passcode is associated with the callsign and is sued to authenticate the daemon. If you do not know your passcode, or how to generate it contact the software provider.

latitude:

The latitude of the point of interest (home QTH) in decimal degrees, North positive.

longitude:

The longitude of the point of interest (home QTH) in decimal degrees, East positive.

radius:

The radius of the area of interest in kilometers.

influxTLS:

Set to 1 to use a TLS connection, 0 to use an unencrypted connection.

influxHost:

The host name of the systme running the influxDB server.

influxPort:

The port used to connect to the influx server.

influxDb:

The name of the database measurements will be sent to.

Command Line Options

The binary, usually at /usr/local/bin/aprs_wx may be run manually for testing purposes by:

sudo aprs_wx --config /usr/local/share/APRS_WX/config.txt