Climate Tracker with Ruuvi Tag

21 Aug 2023 • Programming

As there is currently a heatwave rolling over Switzerland, I wanted to get detailed information on temperature and humidity. While researching some solutions to automatically record these values for multiple places wirelessly, I came across Ruuvi Tags.

In the following tutorial I will outline the steps needed to create a Raspberry Pi based temperature, humidity, and air pressure recorder including a nice graphical front-end. There are already plenty of similar tutorials online but most are either incomplete or a few years old (i.e. following them will get you stuck at some point), hence I wanted to document my journey with the Ruuvi Tags.

Settings Up the Ruuvi Tags

The Ruuvi Tags are trivial to set up. Merely remove the battery pull tag and they should start to broadcast. Using the Ruuvi Station App I was able to test them immediately.

In the Image Below, you can see a Ruuvi Tag next to the Raspberry Pi used for this project.

Raspberry Pi with Ruuvi Tag

Getting the Raspberry Pi Ready

Using the Raspberry Pi Imager Raspberry Pi Imager I downloaded Raspberry Pi OS Lite, the one without a GUI and only a console. While using the Raspberry Pi imager, I used the advanced options to:

  1. Set the hostname of the Raspberry Pi to climate.local.
  2. Allowed SSH access with password authentication.
  3. Configured the Wi-Fi

After writing the image to the SD card, I put it in the Raspberry Pi and connected it to the power.

Installing the Necessary Software on the Raspberry Pi

First we update our Raspberry Pi and install some general dependencies, for this we first connect via SSH (assuming the Raspberry Pi is now connected to your local network).

The command for this is ssh <username>@<hostname> which in my case would be ssh david@climate.local.

After connecting to the Raspberry Pi we can go ahead:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install build-essential git

Now we can go ahead and add the repository for Grafana (instead of blindly copying these commands, check if they are still current: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/setup-grafana/installation/debian/)

sudo wget -q -O /usr/share/keyrings/grafana.key https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/grafana.key] https://apt.grafana.com stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list

Same for InfluxDB (current instructions can be found at https://repos.influxdata.com/)

wget -q https://repos.influxdata.com/influxdata-archive_compat.key
echo '393e8779c89ac8d958f81f942f9ad7fb82a25e133faddaf92e15b16e6ac9ce4c influxdata-archive_compat.key' | sha256sum -c && cat influxdata-archive_compat.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/influxdata-archive_compat.gpg > /dev/null
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/influxdata-archive_compat.gpg] https://repos.influxdata.com/debian stable main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdata.list

Now we will install InfluxDB and Grafana

sudo apt update
sudo apt install influxdb grafana

Last but not least, we start them and make sure they are automatically started on system boot:

sudo systemctl start influxdb
sudo systemctl enable influxdb

sudo systemctl start grafana-server
sudo systemctl enable grafana-server

Setting up the Database

You might want to restart your Raspberry Pi first after installing all the software. Now we enter the InfluxDB. We enter it using the ìnflux command:

influx

Now we can first create a new dataset ‘ruuvi’ and create a new user on this database. Note: replace the password with a password of your choosing.

CREATE DATABASE ruuvi;
CREATE USER "ruuviuser" WITH PASSWORD 'ruuvisuserpassword'
GRANT ALL ON ruuvi TO "ruuviuser"
EXIT

Setting up RuuviCollector

Now we work with the excellent RuuviCollector project. We go ahead and clone it from GitHub

git clone https://github.com/Scrin/RuuviCollector

As a next step, we can start building RuuviCollector. For this we give the setup.sh command (1) the address of the InfluxDB database, the username we have created, the associated password and last but not least the name of the created database.

Running this command might take a few minutes as it fetches all dependencies and builds the software:

sudo ./RuuviCollector/service-setup/setup.sh -d "http://localhost:8086" -u ruuviuser -p ruuvisuserpassword -n ruuvi

Connecting it All

To configure Grafana, we open its configuration file in nano:

sudo nano /etc/grafana/grafana.ini

Using nano we change the following lines to have it run under climate.local:3000 on the local network.

...
;domain = climate.local
...
;http_port = 3000
...

Last but not least, we restart the whole Raspberry Pi

sudo reboot

Configuring the Grafana Dashboard

After waiting a bit for the Rapsberry Pi to restart and grafana to load, we can visit http://climate.local:3000 where we can log in to grafana using the username admin and the password admin.

After entering grafana we can click on adding a new dashboard which will then ask us to configure a data source first.

We can then select InfluxDB with the connection details we have chosen earlier. In my case, that would be

We can then go ahead and add visualizations using the +Add button on the top right of the grafana page.

For example my code to display the temperature looks as follows:

SELECT mean("temperature") FROM "autogen"."ruuvi_measurements" WHERE $timeFilter GROUP BY time($__interval), "mac"::tag fill(null)

If you want, you can add a rename by regex from the transformation tab from the panel creator to replace the MAC address with e.g. the location of the sensor.

My grafana JSON model can be found here if you want to build off it.

In the following picture you can see he finished Grafana Dashboard:

The finished Grafana Dashboard

Conclusion

All in all this is a very fun project and I am impressed by the Ruuvi Tags. Excellent value for the price - they work flawlessly and having both tags next to each other shows very similar readings. I might purchase some more in the future.


Have any feedback?

Please feel free to send me a mail! I would love to hear from you.