Integration of the Davis Vantage VUE weather station over MQTT with Home Assistant

This configuration is set up for personal use, so it's not fully optimized.

I have WeeWX running on a headless Raspberry Pi (old 1st revision, Model B, buster) connected to the older Davis Vantage Vue console via the WeatherLink USB Data Logger (6510USB). Configuration files that reside on the this Raspbery Pi are located in the weewx-host directory. Home Assistant is updated using the weewx-mqtt extension. I use a MySQL database residing on an external server to minimize writes to the SD card. I included udev rules so that the USB weatherlink is automatically attached to /dev/davis.

In order to set up all the sensors on the Home Assistant host, I run the ha-discovery.py script which publishes sensor configuration with the retain flag for easy discovery. This allows all sensors to be linked under a common device heading.

For forecasting, I upload my data to PWS Weather. By uploading my data, I am able to use the Xweather API, but this is all done on the Home Assistant host as the RPi 1 struggles when given too many tasks.

Home Assistant is hosted on a virtual machine on Proxmox. My MQTT broker is run through the official Home Assistant addon.

A rest sensor is set up to obtain hourly and daily forecasts from Xweather. Since Xweather has its own icons for specific conditions, I found it easier and more informative to copy all of these icons to my /config/www/xweather-icon folder and then use a specific xweather frontend theme for any weather cards.

The template weather provider wraps the forecast info and appropriate sensor info into a single weather entity. Other information is converted from the raw weather station values using translations from the Davis Vantage Vue serial communication manual and template sensors.

The above card is set up as follows:

show_current: true
show_forecast: true
type: weather-forecast
entity: weather.wombat_villa
tap_action:
  action: navigate
  navigation_path: /lovelace-weather/today-forecast
hold_action:
  action: navigate
  navigation_path: /lovelace-weather/extended-forecast
view_layout:
  position: sidebar
forecast_type: hourly
secondary_info_attribute: humidity
theme: xweather

Since I use a custom theme, the forecast from clicking on the card doesn't look as nice. I therefore set up specific hourly and daily forecasts that how up when either clicking or holding the weather card.

Located at /lovelace-weather/today-forecast:

type: markdown
card_size: 26
content: |-
  | Time || Weather || Temp || Forecast |
  |:-----:|-|:---------:|-|:-:|-|-----|
  {%- for day in state_attr('sensor.xweather_hourly', 'periods') %}
    | **{{ day.dateTimeISO | as_timestamp | timestamp_custom('%-I %p') }}** | | ![Image](/local/xweather-icon/{{ day.icon }}) | | {{ day.tempF }}°F | | {{ day.weather }} |
  {%- endfor %}

Located at /lovelace-weather/extended-forecast:

type: markdown
card_size: 26
content: |-
  {%- for day in state_attr('sensor.xweather_day', 'periods') %}
    ## {{ day.dateTimeISO | as_timestamp | timestamp_custom('%A (%-m/%d)') }}
    ||||
    |-|-|-|
    |![Image](/local/xweather-icon/{{ day.icon }})| |{{ day.weather }}|

   | High || Low || Humidity || Precipitation || UVI |
   |:-----:|-|:-:|-|:---------:|-|:-:|-|:-----:|   
    | {{ day.maxTempF }}°F || {{ day.minTempF }}°F || {{ day.humidity }}% || {{ day['pop'] }}% || {{ day.uvi }}

    ---
  {%- endfor %}