I’ve completed my first pass at ‘mcweather’, a caching weather server and command line client.
The main thrust here was to decouple weather condition and forecast fetching from qmcrover (a GUI client that is part of mcrover). I wanted a single server at home to fetch the weather information and provide it to local clients (command line and qmcrover). This avoids unnecessary traffic to the NWS (National Weather Service) web sites from local clients. This makes it faster as a consequence, since the local clients get the information from the local server.
It is secured using libDwmCredence. I changed qmcrover to use it, and in the process I updated two of my Raspberry Pis from buster to bullseye. One hurdle I encountered here: I was previously using a hand-built version of Qt 5.12. I didn’t want to continue doing so with bullseye, because Qt is very big and takes a long time to build. But the Raspberry Pi repositories don’t have two of the Qt libraries I need: libqt5webengine5 and libqt5webenginewidgets5. I hence added the debian repository to my list of apt repositories by adding it to /etc/apt/source.list:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free
I also created /etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: origin raspbian.raspberrypi.org
Pin-Priority: 800
Package: *
Pin: origin deb.debian.org
Pin-Priority: 600
So far, so good. I’m running the server (mcweatherd) on the Raspberry Pi 4 that runs qmcrover in full screen mode in my office.
dwm@pi4e:/home/dwm% psg mcweatherd
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 8877 0.0 0.2 32832 8680 ? Sl 01:10 0:02 /usr/local/sbin/mcweatherd