Frankenweather - better(?) weather in PSX

[JRBarrett]

I am trying to use F.W. on another test flight from KDEN to KCVG. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be able to connect to Open Meteo servers at the moment. 20:11Z 12 SEP 2026. The status window shows it was retrying every 30 seconds, but no connection and no data. I waited about 10 minutes and had to give up and revert to PSX default weather.

I am using the latest version of the EXE which I downloaded yesterday.

Follow up: After landing in KCVG around 22:25Z, I started Frankenweather again, and this time it had no problem connecting to Open Meteo and fetching current data...

[macroflight]

Thanks for the report.

Frankenweather should automatically fall back to PSX's normal METAR-derived weather if it cannot fetch data from OpenMeteo (and you should be able to verify this in Instructor).

If one fetches data from these kinds of free services too frequently, the IP address can sometimes be blocked for a short time. I have tried to ensure that frankenweather's OpenMeteo use falls well within the limits for free use of OpenMeteo, and I haven't been blocked since the early experiments.

And no, frankenweather is not fetching data from OpenMeteo every 30 seconds, but the warning is repeated every 30 seconds from the time a problem starts until it can fetch weather again (it tries again every 5 minutes).

If you were indeed temporarily blocked by OpenMeteo due to too many requests, you might have seen messages saying "rate limit" or something similar.

I will add better logging in a future version to make it easier to figure out after the flight what actually happened.

It might have been a temporary technical problem somewhere. Or maybe the "Reserved Servers With Higher Reliability" on https://open-meteo.com/en/pricing means "if we cannot serve all our users, non-paying customers might be cut off completely during periods of high demand".

[andrej]

I had a pleasure of trying the frankenweather and it is quite impressive. Thank you. I can not even imagine how much time and effort went into developing this addon.

Thanks!
Andrej

[JRBarrett]

I don't think it was blocking from too many requests from my IP. Yesterday was the first time I had used F.W. since last weekend, and the flight from OAK to DEN was the only other time I have run FrankenWeather. I assume it was probably a temporary outage, or blockage due to high demand from paying clients.

[macroflight]

Blocking is probably never going to happen just because you fly a lot. It's something I would expect if frankenweather did to many requests per minute/hour while running (which I have tried to make sure it does not).

I ran it for nine hours today. There was a handful of low-grade failed fetches where the first try failed but a retry 30s later succeeded. This would not affect your flight in any way. There was also one 5 minute long outage. During this, frankenweather kept using the existing weather zones (made with openmeteo data) as they were still close enough.

When OpenMeteo fetches failed they returned "503 Server Error: Service Unavailable" which is more likely to be technical problems or overload in their end. When I got temporary blocks during development (tried to fetch test data for the entire world...) I got errors like "429 Too Many Requests" or "403 Forbidden".

The latest version from https://github.com/macroflight/psxhacks/releases adds automatic logging (you can download the logs from the frankenweather web interface on http://localhost:9747/). It would be interesting to check the log from a flight when you have these problems to see what's going on. You can email the log to mats.kronberg.game@gmail.com, it's not big - less than 1 MB for a 9h flight.

[macroflight]

I've fixed a bug in frankenweather (it would not discard old METAR, leading to the creation of weather zones with outdated weather rather than using fresh OpenMeteo data).

I have a feeling this might result in fewer PFD altimeter jumps.

Latest EXE release
Release notes