Hi there,
I hope you’re all well in these crazy times. I (like many people) have built myself a DIY weather station, to learn about electronics (and to a much lesser extent, programming). I really like Grafana for the ease of use in graphing my collected sensor readings. That said, Grafana has one major drawback over alternatives like Node Red, in that it does not have an in-built wind direction/wind rose panel included in the stock installation.
Now I know that there’s a “Fatcloud Wind Rose” plugin for Grafana (and I eventually got it working, despite it’s lack of updates, support and helpful documentation). Unfortunately, a recent update of Grafana itself seems to have broken the link between the Wind rose panel and Grafana on a local Raspberry Pi installation.
I’m afraid that I am just a humble beginner in my programming ability, and while I have a rudimentary understanding of SQL and Python, I do not have the JavaScript and other language skills to use the Plotly panel or debug other plugins. In fact, most of the plotly documentation does not describe how to use it in Grafana’s Plotly panel interface, so I freely admit that after hours of searching for the answer, I’m still utterly clueless.
Since weather stations are probably one of the most common types of IOT/Arduino/Raspberry Pi projects, I ask (kindly) that Grafana’s development team include a wind rose panel like the line graphs and other included panels? Third party plugins are clearly not accounting for updates to Grafana, offer little-to-no support, and are almost universally, poorly documented.
If the Grafana Dev team chooses to heed my request, I only ask for four features of a wind rose panel to make it useful for as many people as possible:
- That it’s kept up to date with Grafana and documented with examples.
- The ability to choose the units for wind speed (or just type it in… I work in Km/h rather than metres per second, some people might prefer knots or miles per hour). I don’t care if we have to simply type the units in for the graph key… whatever makes it easiest for you.
- The ability to select the “granularity” of the speeds. I get a lot of readings in the 0-5Km/h range, I’d like it to be separated into different colours for each Km/h, rather than one colour for 0-5Km, as that would be useless for me. Other people might like even finer increments for other directional data types.
- A (nice to have) ability to choose colour scheme. Bright, dark, and select colour range for different readings. For instance, cool to hot colours, plotly’s “plasma” (a variation on that theme), working through the rainbow in order, or assigning specific colours to particular ranges (like the gauges) would also probably be useful.
All I want is to do is use my database queries, select the wind rose panel, and link the queried data to the graph. I truly believe that Grafana would benefit from an internally-maintained wind rose option.
At the end of the day, flexibility of custom plugins is all good and well for the experts, but surely some sort of base option is sufficient for most kids/beginners. Grafana does line/bar/pie graphs really well, and gauges too. But wind direction has been the bane of my Grafana experience so far.
Any advice, guidance, or relevant links to appropriate documentation would be greatly and humbly appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Hamish.