Coppervane / Support
We're glad to help with anything about the app. Questions about the station itself, its sensors or your ambientweather.net account are best answered by Ambient Weather, since Coppervane only reads what the station reports.
Tell us which device (Mac, iPhone or Apple Watch), the OS version, and what the app showed. There's no need to send your API keys. We can help without them, and we'd rather you kept them to yourself.
Coppervane lives in the menu bar, not the Dock. Look for the copper weather vane at the top right of the screen. Click it for every reading your station reports, and for Settings.
From your Ambient Weather account: ambientweather.net → account page → API Keys → Create API Key. You need both the Application key and the API key. Both are free to create. Paste them into Settings and click Save.
They're read-only keys. They let Coppervane read your station and nothing else, and you can revoke them from the same page whenever you like.
Yes. In Settings, tick Use sample data instead of a station and save. Coppervane runs on invented readings so you can see the menu, the dropdown and every widget. Sample readings are labelled as such throughout, and the station is named Sample Station, so they're never mistaken for your own.
Sky conditions: the little sun or cloud in the Current Conditions widget. Coppervane looks the ZIP up once to get coordinates, then asks Open-Meteo what the sky is doing there. It's optional. Leave it blank and everything else works exactly the same.
Right-click the desktop, choose Edit Widgets, and search for Coppervane. There are four: Current Conditions, Single Reading, Readings Panel and 7-Day History. Three of them can be configured after placing, by right-clicking and choosing Edit Widget, which needs macOS 14 or later.
The widgets show what the app last saved, so keep Coppervane running for them to stay current.
Those messages come from watching what your station sends. Station offline means nothing has arrived for twenty minutes, four missed uploads. Outdoor sensor not reporting means the console is uploading but the outdoor array has gone quiet, and the message names when it was last heard from. Battery low is the console's own report. The menu bar icon becomes a warning triangle while any of these is true, so you don't need to open the menu to notice.
Check the console and your ambientweather.net dashboard. Once the station is uploading again, Coppervane picks it up on its next refresh.
Ambient Weather allows about one request per second per key, and Coppervane paces every request through one queue so it stays well inside that. If the service still asks it to slow down, a warning row appears and the last good reading stays on screen while it retries. If your keys have stopped working altogether, Settings will say so, and pasting them in again fixes it.
Your station reports about every five minutes and Coppervane polls on the same rhythm. Refresh Now in the menu fetches straight away. The 7-Day History keeps a rolling week of daily highs, lows, rainfall and pressure.
macOS 13 or later. Configurable widgets need macOS 14.
On your iPhone, open Coppervane and paste both keys, then tap Validate & Load Stations. Pick your station and your units, and tap Send to Apple Watch. The watch app fills in within a second or two.
Setup, and only setup. The watch app does all the fetching itself, so it works even when your iPhone is out of reach. Keep the iPhone app installed: changing your keys, your station or your units goes through it.
The complication shows what the watch app last saved and never fetches on its own, so it stays empty until the app has run once. Open Coppervane on your watch and give it a moment. If Apple's own complications are blank on the same face, the watch itself needs a restart.
Edit the watch face, tap the complication slot, and pick the reading you want from Coppervane: temperature, feels like, humidity, wind, pressure, rain today, UV, or dew point. You can place it more than once with a different reading in each. The rectangular style adds today's high and low.
Whenever you open the app, and pull down to refresh at any time. In the background it aims for roughly every 25 minutes, and watchOS decides the actual schedule based on how you use the watch. A reading older than an hour is dimmed rather than hidden, so you always know how fresh it is.
Whichever your device uses, until you choose. Change it on the iPhone and send to the watch again, or change it directly on the watch.
Coppervane only shows what your station reports. A sensor the station doesn't have never gets a row. Tap any reading to see its day: every reading charted, today's high and low, and when they happened.
iOS 17 and watchOS 10 or later.