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Weather stuff... question

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Malakie
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Weather stuff... question

Post by Malakie »

Has anyone done any kind of weather display for desktop that can read Weatherunderground weather locations or Ambient weather systems?

I have a NOAA reporting weather station on my property and would like to monitor it directly on my desktop.
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Yincognito
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Re: Weather stuff... question

Post by Yincognito »

Malakie wrote: June 29th, 2021, 8:19 pm Has anyone done any kind of weather display for desktop that can read Weatherunderground weather locations or Ambient weather systems?

I have a NOAA reporting weather station on my property and would like to monitor it directly on my desktop.
There have been some (e.g. here or here), but most of them are old and don't work (or don't work properly) anymore. You can try your luck here and see if you can find a skin that has WeatherUnderground as a source, but it can take a while, if there are any, that is.

That being said, there have been changes to the WU API, see here, so I'm not sure if it's even possible to get data from there as it used to be possible. If you do however and get a response in XML, JSON or even HTML by using your personal weather station API key (if you have one, that is), you can paste part of the content here, maybe folks could help in giving you directions to update your WU source parsing system.

P.S. Not sure if you can retrieve WU's data using the Weather.com source, but if it's possible, then problem solved. There are plenty of skins nowadays that use Weather.com as a source - hopefully that will last more than the WU source...
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SilverAzide
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Re: Weather stuff... question

Post by SilverAzide »

Malakie wrote: June 29th, 2021, 8:19 pm Has anyone done any kind of weather display for desktop that can read Weatherunderground weather locations or Ambient weather systems?

I have a NOAA reporting weather station on my property and would like to monitor it directly on my desktop.
I personally have not tried creating a skin for WUnderground or a weather station for a few reasons. WUnderground does not have a free API, which limits any appeal for authors wanting to build a skin that everyone can use. Personal weather stations have limited appeal as well, since an author would need to create vendor-specific skins. While there is an excellent way to build weather.com-based skins using the TWC API, skins for other data sources are comparatively rare. Skins that scrape websites (like Yahoo and others) are fragile since they break whenever the site changes, so most authors tend to avoid these sources as well.

NOAA has a free API, but it only shows weather in the USA, so again this limits the audience for a skin.

So the upshot of all this is, if your weather station has a data feed you can access via it's API, then it is not terribly difficult to build a skin to read that data. "Not terribly difficult" means you understand how to use the WebParser measure, which is not that easy since it heavily depends on Regular Expressions (regexp) to parse the feed. There are lots of folks on this forum that have a disturbing and rather frighteningly thorough grasp on how to use the gnarliest of regexps, so you can always ask if you get stuck.
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Yincognito
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Re: Weather stuff... question

Post by Yincognito »

SilverAzide wrote: June 29th, 2021, 10:11 pmThere are lots of folks on this forum that have a disturbing and rather frighteningly thorough grasp on how to use the gnarliest of regexps...
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jsmorley
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Re: Weather stuff... question

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Re: Weather stuff... question

Post by Active Colors »

Yincognito wrote: June 29th, 2021, 10:47 pm
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360_F_100962139_mXSvLRI8IVWgAezljm4dxpxfeAuPfaxI.jpg
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Yincognito
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Re: Weather stuff... question

Post by Yincognito »

Active Colors wrote: June 30th, 2021, 11:16 am
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360_F_100962139_mXSvLRI8IVWgAezljm4dxpxfeAuPfaxI.jpg
Yeah, it was one of my reply choices too, that one (though for me that is clear as daylight, not to mention it actually works perfectly). :rolmfao:
However, I wanted folks to understand "something" out of my reply, so went with the funny expression / depression image above. :???:
Guess who's the author of that code (tries hard not to look in the mirror)...
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