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Automatic display of weather warnings?
What's required to get Carousel to automatically generate weather warnings for a particular area? Or is this even possible? I'm thinking about things like thunderstorm warnings, tornado warnings, etc.
Thanks in advance!
Thanks in advance!
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Inappropriate?I asked this question a few years ago and the answer was no. At that time I was wondering about hooking up an EAS decoder. I think this would be a nice feature.
I’m sitting here thinking about lunch
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Inappropriate?Thanks, Brent. I'll keep searching for ways to do this. I think it would be a pretty valuable feature to automate warnings like this - even at universities and other public institutions where they have warnings for other events.
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Inappropriate?Hey guys...
The answer unfortunately is still no in terms of making an "official" weather bulletin. (Though we did make some back-end improvements to the weather bulletins in a recent update that will make it easier to implement weather alerts some day... So, that's progress, right?) :-)
However, there might be a workaround. If you can find an RSS feed on the internet that contains weather warnings, you should be able to make a RSS bulletin in Carousel that consumes that feed. It's my understanding that if the feed is populated only when there are active alerts (in other words, the feed is empty when it's sunny, and has a couple items when there are tornadoes), then the RSS bulletin will only appear on-screen when you've got active weather alerts.
I'm hoping another TRMS'er can confirm that behavior... I'm not 100% sure if the bulletin hides itself when the feed is empty.
-John
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I was thinking the same thing. I'm upgrading my Carousel install here in Maine to test the functionality. I'll post what I discover! -
Inappropriate?***Disclaimer****
This isn't a TRMS supported way to do something, its just how I spent part of my snow day. You got to admit though, it is cool!
****End Disclaimer****
So the bad news first. WeatherBug does not allow commercial api subscribers (TRMS) to display weather alert information. We are only allowed to 'link' to it which is kinda hard in digital signage unless you are using our awesome interactive bulletins.
Now the good news. Alert RSS bulletins work as expected. If a feed is empty they don't display and the regular scheduled bulletin cycle rolls on. However if an alert RSS feed as items, it works just as it should and displays those alerts instead of the normal scheduled bulletins.
Now for more bad news. All the feeds I could find, specifically the ones provided by NOAA which can be used freely (hey its your tax money) do not provide an 'empty' feed when there are no alerts. They kindly tell you "There are no active watches, warnings or advisories"
Now for even more good news. I whipped up a little RoR app that does nothing but act as a middle man so that if you have no alerts in your area, the feed will be empty and Carousel will ignore it. Here is the play by play:
1) Go to: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/alerts-beta/ scroll down and find your state and click on "Zone List"
2) Now find the area that is closest to you and copy the corresponding "Zone Code"
3) Take the following URL and replace the XXXXX with your Zone
http://weatheralert.heroku.com/feed.r...
4)Setup a Carosuel Dynamic RSS Alert Bulletin using that feed. Here is how I set mine up:
Click finish and thats it.
And the proof is in the pudding (Sorry for the crappy quality. iPhone picture of a bad TV)
So for those who noticed. NOAA is currently calling these feeds "beta" so if and when the url changes it might mess things up. Just drop a message here if the feed seems to be broken, and I'll do my best to get it going again.
-ray
I’m I'm a geek
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Inappropriate?I DO appreciate you taking part of your snow day to work on this problem!
One question, though:
Where does this URL come from: http://weatheralert.heroku.com/feed.r....
When I try that with my local zone it gives me warnings from outside of my immediate area - like 300 miles outside of my area, so it's not really useful for our purposes. I guess it's a Weather Service issue. I'm in contact with our local weather bureau folks to ask them about it at well.
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Hey Patrick,
Sorry its not working as planned. The weatheralert.heroku feed just parses a feed from NOAA.gov. So there isn't much I can do.
If you find a good RSS feed though, setting up an RSS bulletin like I showed above should get you there.
Good Luck.
-ray -
Inappropriate?Nice solution Ray! I tried it tonight. This beats putting up a bulletin from NWS saying that nothing's really happening right now!!
I used it as a standard bulletin instead of an alert bulletin to avoid too much interruption of our bulletin board. The NWS puts out frequent alerts that aren't always really *severe*. Tonight we got a warning about lake effect snow that could result in as much as a half-inch of snow. Big woop! Let me know when a tornado's coming!!!
Maybe I'll put it in as an Active Repeating Bulletin? That way, when there's pertinent info, it could come up every 5 or 10 bulletins...
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Inappropriate?Ray -
Going back to your tutorial, do you have to select any "From" "To" dates? Won't it just become a stale bulletin at the end of the day as you have it listed above? We've not had any alerts since I first asked this question, so I can't really test it.
Thanks!
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Ooops. In my screen shot I typed "uncheck this" but what I ment to type was check this. I on my system I checked "Until Manually Turned off" so the bulletin never expires.
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