Ecowitt weather station to APRS bridge
Ecowitt2APRS is a new open-source Linux service that I have been working on for the past few weeks. This project is designed to seamlessly integrate weather data from Ecowitt compatible professional weather stations into the global Automatic Packet Reporting System Internet Service (APRS-IS) network, transmitting this information in the standardized format of APRS weather packets.
APRS, an amateur radio-based system, facilitates real-time tactical digital communications, covering applications such as GPS position reporting and the dissemination of meteorological data. Ecowitt2APRS addresses a specific need within this ecosystem: providing a lightweight and efficient method for weather stations to contribute to this data stream.
The Ecowitt2APRS service is developed as a minimalist daemon for Linux environments. It ingests live weather data from Ecowitt compatible stations, converts it into the required APRS weather packet format, and then relays these packets to the APRS-IS network. One of my primary objectives was to create a service that operates effectively on minimal Linux systems, such as low-power SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero. This enables dedicated, continuous weather reporting with minimal operational overhead and power consumption.
I'm testing this system with my Ecowitt WiFi weather hub - GW2000C. The live feed from my Ecowitt2APRS instance is available as 4S6DRJ-13, and I am hosting the Ecowitt2APRS daemon on the Orange Pi Zero LTS board.
As an open-source initiative, all source code, documentation, and installation instructions are publicly available in the project repository on GitHub. This page also provides pre-built binaries of Ecowitt2APRS for ARM64, ARMv7, and AMD64 architectures. Anyone interested in deploying this can download the binaries or compile the source code themselves. The source code has limited external dependencies and can be easily built using the GCC toolchain. The compilation steps are outlined in the project's readme file.
To manually deploy the downloaded package, follow these steps:
1. Extract the files:
tar -xvf ./ec-aprs-wx-linux-<PLATFORM>.tar.gz
2. Copy the necessary files:
sudo cp ./ec-aprs-wx /usr/local/bin/ec-aprs-wx sudo cp ./config.cfg /etc/ec-aprs-wx.cfg sudo cp ./ec-aprs-wx.service /etc/systemd/system/ec-aprs-wx.service
Before starting the service, make sure to open the /etc/ec-aprs-wx.cfg file and edit the fields: APRS_CALLSIGN_SSID, APRS_PASSCODE, APRS_LATITUDE, and APRS_LONGITUDE. The details for these fields are covered in the readme file of the project.
To start the service, issue the following command:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
To enable the service to start automatically on system reboot, issue the following command:
sudo systemctl enable ec-aprs-wx.service
To trigger this service, the Ecowitt device needs to be configured, with the configuration steps detailed in the project's readme file.
If all configuration steps are correct, you should be able to observe the weather data feed from APRS monitoring sites like https://aprs.fi or https://aprs.to.
