Ecowitt weather stations (hc-ecowitt)

Bridges Ecowitt weather station gateways and consoles into HomeCore. Sensors are dynamically discovered from the data stream — no manual sensor listing required.

Data ingestion

Two ingestion modes; you can run either or both:

Mode	When to use
HTTP POST receiver (primary)	The Ecowitt gateway pushes data to the plugin on its configured upload interval. Reliable, low-latency, no polling load.
HTTP GET polling (optional)	The plugin polls the gateway's /get_livedata_info endpoint. Useful as a bootstrap path on startup, or as a fallback if push uploads don't reach the plugin.

Push mode is preferred. Polling is the right choice when the gateway sits on a network that can't reach the plugin's listen address (e.g. strict NAT) but the plugin can reach the gateway.

Supported sensors

All sensors present in the gateway's data stream are auto-registered on first observation. Common types include:

• Temperature (indoor / outdoor / soil / water)
• Humidity (indoor / outdoor)
• Barometric pressure (absolute / relative)
• Wind speed and direction
• Rainfall (rate, hourly, daily, monthly, yearly)
• UV index
• Solar radiation
• CO2
• PM2.5 / PM10

Multi-channel sensors (e.g. eight outdoor temperature probes) are each registered as a separate device.

Setup

1. Plugin config — copy config/config.toml.example to config/config.toml:

   [homecore]
   broker_host = "127.0.0.1"
   broker_port = 1883
   plugin_id   = "plugin.ecowitt"
   password    = ""
   
   [ecowitt]
   listen_port = 8888
   
   # Optional: poll mode. Also used as the default target for the
   # discover_gateways / refresh_sensors / get_gateway_info actions.
   # gateway_ip         = "10.0.10.50"
   # poll_interval_secs = 60
   
   # Optional: explicit IPs to probe alongside the UDP broadcast scan
   # in discover_gateways. Use when consoles live behind a managed
   # switch that doesn't forward UDP broadcast.
   # manual_hosts = ["10.0.20.5", "10.0.30.5"]

2. Configure the Ecowitt gateway to push data to HomeCore. In the Ecowitt app, open Device → Customized:

   Field	Value
   Protocol	Ecowitt
   Server IP	The IP of the host running hc-ecowitt
   Path	/data/report/
   Port	8888 (or the listen_port you configured)
   Upload interval	60 seconds

   Save and enable the customized upload. Within one upload interval, sensors will appear as devices in HomeCore.

3. Register the plugin in homecore.toml:

   [[plugins]]
   id      = "plugin.ecowitt"
   binary  = "../plugins/hc-ecowitt/target/release/hc-ecowitt"
   config  = "../plugins/hc-ecowitt/config/config.toml"
   enabled = true

Plugin actions

hc-ecowitt ships a capabilities manifest exposing several gateway-management actions visible in the Leptos web admin and via hc-mcp:

• discover_gateways — UDP broadcast + HTTP probe of manual_hosts
• refresh_sensors — force-poll the gateway and re-register devices
• get_gateway_info — fetch firmware version, MAC, model
• set_custom_server — push the plugin's listen URL into the gateway's customized upload settings

These hit the gateway's cgi-bin endpoints; the target IP is resolved from gateway_ip (when set), the in-memory cache populated by discover_gateways, or manual_hosts.

Network considerations

discover_gateways issues a CMD_BROADCAST UDP probe on 255.255.255.255:46000. On a multi-NIC host this lands on the default broadcast interface, which may not be the IoT network where your gateways live. Two fixes:

1. Pin a multicast/broadcast route to the IoT interface (see the Sonos discovery notes for the technique — same idea, different addresses).
2. List manual_hosts with the gateway IPs explicitly. The plugin probes them via HTTP GET /get_device_info? whenever a discovery is triggered, bypassing UDP entirely.

SDK adoption

hc-ecowitt is built on hc-plugin-sdk-rs and supports the full management protocol: heartbeat, remote configuration, dynamic log level, and MQTT log forwarding. The capability manifest lists every plugin action available to rules and hc-mcp.