Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Posted on
Thu Oct 12, 2017 5:39 am
norcoscia offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Thx, Dave, it seems to be working great so far :D

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Norm

Posted on
Thu Oct 12, 2017 6:16 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Good deal. Thanks for letting me know.

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Posted on
Thu Oct 12, 2017 6:25 am
norcoscia offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

I ment to ask you if you have any plans to show town names on the radar image(s) - maybe that is not possible with the API but figured I'd ask.

I wanted to do the 10 dollar a year payment to WU to help keep the service going but all I found was free or 20 dollars a month (which is not in my budget) - is the info (I think I read it in one of your documents) about 10 dollars a year a donation just old and no longer applies?

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Norm

Posted on
Thu Oct 12, 2017 7:07 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

As far as I can tell, town names are not available for the radar images. Sorry.

Regarding the $10 mentioned, that's an annual "membership" fee which removes ads from the website and iOS app; I use the free developer level API. I encourage users of the plugin to become Weather Underground members as a small way of saying thanks for the services WU provide.

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Posted on
Thu Oct 12, 2017 7:37 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Well, I've finally seen the issue where the Radar Image stops updating -- where Preview and Safari are unable to open the image...

I will see what I can do to look into this further. Stay tuned.

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Posted on
Fri Oct 13, 2017 6:10 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

I've spent a fair bit of time on this and, as far as I can tell, the problem is with the image file that Weather Underground is returning. I have tried numerous methods of downloading the file as well as calling directly using Safari. Given that the composited URL works sometimes but not others I have to believe that it's constructed properly. Given that the URL will sometimes fail when called directly with Safari gives me little hope of being able to overcome the problem. Which means that it's up to me to try to find a way to handle the error locally. I'm looking into suitable options to do that.

Please continue to stand by. :)

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Posted on
Fri Oct 13, 2017 12:37 pm
norcoscia offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Mine is acting up again - the image cannot be opened - below is the info that was in the datafork part of the bad file. I'd like to try different options for specifying the image location - do you have a handy way or tool that will allow me to specify four corners (or something different ) I'm using my location and a circle now - image is 200 miles and 1500x1500.
Attachments
2017-10-13_11-32-59.png
2017-10-13_11-32-59.png (20.25 KiB) Viewed 4928 times

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Norm

Posted on
Fri Oct 13, 2017 3:49 pm
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Hi Norm - thanks for the information. That the request works sometimes and not others leads me to believe that the URL is constructed properly (but I've learned that belief and reality are often two different things). Regarding your question, the feature is already baked in. For the Radar device type, select Bounding Box location type. This type requires minimum and maximum latitude and longitude values:

Screen Shot 2017-10-13 at 4.43.59 PM.png
Screen Shot 2017-10-13 at 4.43.59 PM.png (18.77 KiB) Viewed 4917 times

WUradar.gif
WUradar.gif (371.33 KiB) Viewed 4917 times


This is my preferred setting for my own installation. This will not guarantee error-free operation, as mine has resulted in a corrupt image with this setting with the existing plugin).

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Posted on
Sat Oct 14, 2017 6:38 am
norcoscia offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Thx, Dave - yes, I noticed that box but unsure how best to come up with the numbers to plug in - I messed around with google map but did not see an easy way to come up with the numbers... No worries just wondering..

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Norm

Posted on
Sat Oct 14, 2017 7:03 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Hi Norm - it's a matter of taste really. Here's how I did mine.

  • Obviously, you'll need to know (at least generally) the lat and long of your home. I used the value from my Indigo server.
  • Where I live, the weather generally moves from west to east and I don't particularly care about the weather once it's passed me by. It sometimes comes from the north or south so I decided to leave my home roughly in between the top and bottom of the image.
  • I set my lat and long to be approximately 2 degrees plus and minus which gave me a box with my home roughly in the center and at a decent level of zoom.
  • I added and subtracted 0.5 degrees from my longitude value until my home was much closer to the right side of the image, and then tweaked to taste.

It was a bit of trial and error but I'm happy with the result.

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Posted on
Sat Oct 14, 2017 7:07 am
norcoscia offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Thx!

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Norm

Posted on
Sun Oct 15, 2017 9:13 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

I have posted a new version of the plugin that will only attempt to write a new image file when WU's servers respond with a success code.

Hopefully, this will eliminate the corrupted image file issue that we've been facing.

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Posted on
Tue Oct 17, 2017 3:57 pm
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

DaveL17 wrote:
Thanks Norm. I don't know if WU says when the count is reset (I have a call in to tech support on that) but I had always presumed that it was 00:00 their time.

It took a bit for them to respond, but WU did respond. The Weather Underground API counter is reset at 00:00 Pacific Time. I will add a note to look at the code to convert local time to PT and reset the counter at that time.

I came here to drink milk and kick ass....and I've just finished my milk.

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Posted on
Wed Oct 18, 2017 4:15 am
norcoscia offline
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Re: Question on animated Radar image and request for upgrade

Thx, Dave!

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Norm

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