I've noticed that for the past few weeks my Photo Frame has been reporting odd weather. Instead of Brisbane, Australia it was giving me weather for Whitby, GB. I didn't pay much attention to it at first but then it got to me, I checked the configuration and that hasn't changed so I figured there must be something odd going on with OpenWeatherMap and turns out I was right.

This is what I was seeing...Whitby, GB is nowhere near Brisbane either!


I dug into my code and saw that the results returned from owmClient were always the same no matter which city I requested.

Doing a bit more debugging I found that the request URL looked up by owmClient is something like this...


Opening that in a browser does return results and always for Whitby, GB! Doesn't matter which city you put in. It also looks like the other parameters in the URL have no effect. Effectively the OWM 2.1 API is now crippled and unusable.



The 2.1 API is quite old and isn't even documented by OpenWeatherMap any more. The focus is on the 2.5 version of the API which requires an API key so is a little more work to use.

Incidentally I did try the 2.5 version of the URL, which is something like...


That worked and returned data for the city I requested!

This means that projects like owmClient that haven't switched over to the new API are more or less unusable now. I'll be updating my code for jPhotoFrame shortly to remedy this issue, perhaps it's time to go back to Yahoo! Weather now that it is working again.

I raised a support ticket with OpenWeatherMap several days ago and haven't heard back yet so perhaps this crippling of the 2.1 API was intentional on their end to force the use of the 2.5 version.

-i