Blue Iris Tools - Weather Overlay, Watchdog & more!

Blue Iris Tools - Weather Overlay, Watchdog & more! 1.6.0

Download
Overview Updates (23) Reviews (2) History Discussion
Mike said:
I'm very happy to introduce Blue Iris Tools to everyone. Blue Iris Tools was created to act as a companion to Blue Iris and has a bunch of features built in to help maximize your Blue Iris experience.

Some of the core features of Blue Iris Tools are:
  • Weather Overlays
    • Easily add the local weather to your camera feeds,
    • Easily create Macros for Blue Iris right from BI Tools,
    • Ability to assign all weather conditions to 1 Macro!
    • Retrieve & overlay weather from multiple locations
  • Watchdog
    • If Blue Iris crashes or closes, BI Tools will re-open it
    • Monitor Blue Iris (whether running 'normal' or as a service)
    • Monitor Blue Iris' web server. If BIT cannot connect, activate alerts
    • CPU monitor + CPU Overlay
    • BI folders monitor
    • IP Address monitor (notify if change)
    • Notifications - Get notified if BI crashes via e-mail, push notifications via Pushover (download BIT icon here), by playing a sound, pinging / launching a URL.
  • Web Server File Management
    • Insert Google Analytics into web server files easily,
    • Search & Replace in web server files - manually or automatically
  • Language
    • Create and import custom language phrases and definitions. Language files are available in the 2nd post of this thread. If you created your own, please share it!
    • Click here to download or share language files
  • DDNS Updater & IP Management
    • Automatically update DDNS providers when your IP address changes
    • Integrated with IPCT DDNS. Our free DDNS solution.
  • Log
    • Log all BIT related actions (BIT open / close, etc.)
    • Watchdog (Anytime the Watchdog is triggered - if BI is closed, etc.)
    • Weather Updates (anytime the weather is updated)
    • DDNS Updater (when your IP changes, etc.)
    • CPU Usage (log CPU usage during alerts, etc.)
    • Overlay IP address on camera
  • BI Update Manager
    • Keep previous versions of Blue Iris
    • Easily restore previous BI versions
  • BIT Cloud
    • BIT Cloud Remote - Connect to BIT from another remote BIT to view / manage settings and control BIT / BI, etc.
    • BIT Cloud Web Server - A personal website for you to connect to from any browser on any device to check your BIT / BI, including stats, weather, log, cpu, settings, etc.
    • BIT Cloud Watchdog - Remotely monitor a BI or BIT install - with watchdog alerts.
  • Add-ons
    • Create your own or install from the community for more control of BI and BIT
    • BIT Event Handlers installed for interaction with BIT & BI
    • View add-ons wiki here
  • Key Manager
    • Easily retrieve your license key from your machine
    • Store other license keys
  • Batch Config Tool (BI4)
    • Update multiple camera's settings at once

BI Tools uses WUnderground to gather the weather. You can find your nearest station here. I plan on adding more weather providers in the future.

Here are some screenshots of Blue Iris Tools.
View attachment 38291View attachment 38286View attachment 38303View attachment 38294View attachment 38290View attachment 38302View attachment 38304View attachment 38305View attachment 38348 View attachment 38350View attachment 38299View attachment 38298View attachment 38301View attachment 38285View attachment 38306View attachment 38295View attachment 38296View attachment 38297View attachment 38300View attachment 38292View attachment 38293

Here are a few examples of the weather on your video feeds. You can select which conditions to show, what units to display and more.
View attachment 38287 View attachment 38288 View attachment 38289

I have put together athread to act as a 'help file' or a place that provides details and explanations on how to use the software, what each feature and setting does, etc. If you cannot find the answers you are looking for in the help file then you may ask for support in this thread. Please view the add-ons wiki for information on how to use the add-ons system.

A big thanks to the beta team for helping get BIT where it is! Blue Iris Tools was built by me and is offered for free to everyone. I ask that you don't redistribute the software, rather direct people here to download it. I am not a programmer by trade, I just wanted to put together this software to help out the Blue Iris community. I expect bugs to crop up throughout the early releases but I plan on building and maintaining BI Tools long term, so if you do find bugs or have issues don't worry, whatever it is I will take care of. Just let me know. Please don't hesitate to leave your suggestions or feedback as well. I want to build and expand BI Tools as much as possible and have a lot of really good ideas that will make their way into future releases.

I plan on updating this thread when I release updates and will use it as a centralized location to discuss BI Tools. Please visit this thread for the help file and see the 2nd post in this thread for language files.

Current Release
Jan 18, 2020 - v.1.6.0 - If you already have BIT then update via BIT. If not, download the installer using the link on the top of this page.

Upcoming
-Send commands via BIT Cloud Web Server pages
-More info & controls from BIT Cloud Web Server and BIT Cloud Remote
-"My BIT Cloud" - Personal storage space to backup BIT, BI & more.
-BIT Cloud API
-Add custom CSS and HTML to the web server pages

Download & Installation Instructions
  • Blue Iris Tools v1.6.0 Installer.zip - For new installations download Blue Iris Tools v1.6.0 Installer.zip and extract the files. From there, run setup.exe. If your web browser or firewall flags it, disable during installation. If you encounter errors during the install, please 'ignore' them if possible. If you have a previous version of BIT, make sure it is closed. Always check for an update after installation.

  • bit-update.zip - If you are upgrading from a previous version of BIT that did not use the installer then download the bit-update.zip file, close BIT if it is running and extract the contents over your previous installation of Blue Iris tools. You may also download and install via the installer if you like. All future versions will be updated via BIT itself.

  • error-files only for issues.zip - Only use this if you are unable to properly install or run BIT, then download the contents of "error-files only for issues.zip" and extract them to a directory of your choice. Run BIT from there. If you are still having issues then please post in this thread.
Donate
I have been asked several times about accepting a donation for my work, so I finally decided to set up an easy way to do so. While it's not obligated, it's certainly appreciated. Blue Iris Tools is free and always will be free, but if you would like to make a donation, you may do so by clicking here - Donate to Blue Iris Tools

The link to download has been moved to the top of the page.
Click to expand...

Is there currently a way to get the weather to trigger other things, via the BI Tools interface? For instance, if there's rain in the forecast, can I have that also turn off my Racchio sprinkler system? OFC I can do it in Home Assistant or just pull that data from BI tools and set up a workflow in MCP or even just a .bat file to curl the Racchio API; however, it would be nice to be able to do it in one place, automatically, ideally in the application that I look at the most, which is my cameras.

Thanks.
 
phydeaux said:
04/11/25 Issues resolved for me.

I had to go to Wunderground and obtain in NEW API key. Might be short lived as my Weather station has been out of commission for well over a year. I'm fudging it for now.
Click to expand...
Thank you -- grabbing a new API key even though it said my current key wouldn't expire until May fixed my connection issue.
 
I'm unable to make Blue Iris Tools pull data from Wunderground since last week still.
  • Tried multiple stations that I confirmed are online that have realitime data showing up on Wunderground.
  • Tried inputting my Wunderground API key in Blue Iris Tools. My Blue Iris Tools / Wunderground data pull has worked for years without an API key, and putting an API key historically would actually make it not work.
  • Tried deleting existing API key and generating a new one and putting that in Blue Iris Tools
If anyone has any other thoughts, would love to hear it! The forum activity for the developer of Blue Iris Tools @Mike shows he hasn't been online on ipcamtalk since Friday, so maybe need to be patient to see if he knows what might be up.

I'm wondering what is different for those of you that say you have it working right now, as I can't get it to without an API key either, even a newly generated one.
 
Last edited:
I too was experiencing issues with the weather portion of Blue Iris Tools. I gave up after about a week of waiting for things to be resolved. I discovered the latest version of Blue Iris will support a different weather function (API). Do a search in the forum for OpenWeatherMap. You'll find a number of posts. I switched over to it today and am very happy with the results.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: JDinNoVA
Unfortunately, OpenWeatherMap through Blue Iris doesn't quite meet all my needs, at least with an initial look.
  • It doesn't seem to have anything regarding precipitation (I use the day's total precipitation and rain rate) Not having that is disappointing to me.
  • It doesn't give the ability to write to a text file, so using the data in OBS (which is what I use to stream my camera to YouTube) doesn't have a way to read that data. At least I don't see quite yet where the data might be being written whether it be a file or to the Windows registry.
 
Last edited:
  • It doesn't give the ability to write to a text file, so using the data in OBS (which is what I use to stream my camera to YouTube) doesn't have a way to read that data. At least I don't see quite yet where the data might be being written whether it be a file or to the Windows registry.
Click to expand...

This is quite easy to set up using BP2008's JsonDataExtractor utility.
I've had it running for a variety of APIs since he introduced it in 2021.

Here's an example by screenshot configuring it for OpenWeatherMap, using the following URL
https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?lat={lat}&lon={lon}&units=imperial&appid={API key}

1744866978840.png


The files are updated every 300 seconds, and are located here:

1744867035618.png
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns
AMP said:
Unfortunately, OpenWeatherMap through Blue Iris doesn't quite meet all my needs, at least with an initial look.
  • It doesn't seem to have anything regarding precipitation (I use the day's total precipitation and rain rate) Not having that is disappointing to me.
  • It doesn't give the ability to write to a text file, so using the data in OBS (which is what I use to stream my camera to YouTube) doesn't have a way to read that data. At least I don't see quite yet where the data might be being written whether it be a file or to the Windows registry.
Click to expand...
OpenWeatherMap does show precipitation info on their website, but your are correct it's unavailable to Blue Iris. No macros for precipitation.
 
So, I got tired of Wunderground not working again, so I found this old thread that I had used a couple of years ago. I updated the script and setup a task using windows task scheduler to update every 15 minutes.

J

Post in thread 'API connection down'

Inspired by @Chris Moore, I've created a script that illustrates how you can extract additional weather variables from the Open-Meteo API, like...
  • condition description,
  • hourly precipitation,
  • relative humidity,
  • dew point,
  • cloud cover
  • sunrise, sunset
  • daily precipitation.
See Weather Forecast API | Open-Meteo.com for more variables you can extract.

To customize the script (see the attached *.zip file) for your location, simply edit the variables in the USER SETTINGS section.

EDIT (2023-03-27): Updated script to V2 (Updated the $conditions...
  • Like

If anyone needs a tutorial on setting up a scheduled task for powershell scripts, this one worked well for me and had good explanations.

woshub.com

Run PowerShell Scripts on a Schedule with Task Scheduler | Windows OS Hub

In Windows, the built-in Task Scheduler can be used to perform an action according to a schedule or when a certain event occurs. This guide explains how to configure a…
woshub.com
 
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns
DsineR said:
OpenWeatherMap does show precipitation info on their website, but your are correct it's unavailable to Blue Iris. No macros for precipitation.
Click to expand...
This is the data that I'm getting when I do the URL:
1745085030557.png


I did find where Blue Iris writes the data in the registry:
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Perspective Software\Blue Iris\Options
Blue Iris OpenWeatherMaps Registry.png



This is quite easy to set up using BP2008's JsonDataExtractor utility.
jaydeel said:
I've had it running for a variety of APIs since he introduced it in 2021.

Here's an example by screenshot configuring it for OpenWeatherMap, using the following URL
https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?lat={lat}&lon={lon}&units=imperial&appid={API key}

View attachment 219202

The files are updated every 300 seconds, and are located here:

View attachment 219203
Click to expand...
Thanks for this info! Bummed that the data doesn't show and precipitation, and dew point. But I can do a formula to calculate dew point, so I can workaround that part. And I guess I need to do some programming (or have ChatGPT do it) to convert wind direction from degrees to cardinal direction.
 
I did find where Blue Iris writes the data in the registry:
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Perspective Software\Blue Iris\Options
Click to expand...

Good find. To handle the weather parameters that are floating point numbers (decimals), I'm assuming that Ken would need to change the REG_DWORD key types to REG_SZ (string) format, or REG_BINARY format as 8-byte (double) IEEE-754 binary representations.
 
According to ChatGPT (see below) it MAY BE possible to get and save precipitation data using the free openweathermap API.

If you are interested in the details, here's a link to my full ChatGPT query.

Skip to the end of my full query for a final Powershell script for testing. I've also attached the Powershell script as a zip file.
Note that you need to edit the script to add your API key, geolocation, and units preference.

MY QUESTION:
Just so I understand, Endpoint https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather may return precipitation, if available. Is this always true if my location has seen precipitation in the past hour? Or is it location dependent?

ChatGPT's RESPONSE: (highlighting is mine)
Great question — here's the nuanced answer:

Why Not Always?​

The availability of precipitation data from this endpoint depends on a few factors:

1. Source of Weather Data​

  • OpenWeatherMap pulls data from a mix of sources:
    • Local weather stations
    • Radar data (where available)
    • Weather models (in areas without dense instrumentation)
  • In areas with limited station coverage or delayed updates, precipitation fields may be missing even if rain occurred.

2. Data Update Lag​

  • Sometimes the API doesn't reflect very recent precipitation due to delays in receiving or processing source data.

3. Precipitation Amount Threshold​

  • If the recorded rainfall is very light, the system may omit the "rain" key altogether — it appears to require a measurable amount, possibly above a small threshold (like 0.1 mm).

4. Free Tier Restrictions​

  • While not explicitly documented, some data granularity (especially in rural or less-populated regions) may be lower on the free tier compared to paid tiers.
 

Attachments

Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom