Weather Underground Plugin

Posted on
Mon May 15, 2017 11:43 pm
webdeck offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

I still get this error every hour. Is there any way to fix it?

Code: Select all
2017-05-15 21:55:19.453   WUnderground Error   Unable to send forecast email message. Error: list index out of range (Line 550). Will try again later.

My weather station is "KSQL" (San Carlos, CA, 94070), if that helps diagnose the problem.

Thanks,
-Mike

Posted on
Tue May 16, 2017 3:58 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

Hi Mike. This is likely broken data from WU causing the problem. Can you please let me know which version of the plugin you're using?


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Posted on
Tue May 16, 2017 8:26 am
webdeck offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

DaveL17 wrote:
Hi Mike. This is likely broken data from WU causing the problem. Can you please let me know which version of the plugin you're using?


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I just realized I was out of date (it could no longer check for updates for some reason.) I just installed 1.0.17 and it's working now. Sorry for the trouble!

Posted on
Tue May 16, 2017 8:43 am
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

That's great news. Thanks for letting me know. If you continue to have trouble with update checks, please report that. Those should be working regardless of WU data issues.


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Posted on
Tue May 16, 2017 10:38 am
webdeck offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

DaveL17 wrote:
That's great news. Thanks for letting me know. If you continue to have trouble with update checks, please report that. Those should be working regardless of WU data issues.


When I checked for updates with the old version 1.0.05, it gave the error "Unable to reach the version server."

Posted on
Tue May 16, 2017 11:06 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

webdeck wrote:
When I checked for updates with the old version 1.0.05, it gave the error "Unable to reach the version server."

That's helpful, thanks. I'll look into it.

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Posted on
Tue May 16, 2017 11:10 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

Mike - when you have a chance, please try to check for updates with the current version and see if you're still having the problem. Mine is working as expected and I've tried with both https: and http: and both seem to work.

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Posted on
Tue May 16, 2017 9:31 pm
webdeck offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

DaveL17 wrote:
Mike - when you have a chance, please try to check for updates with the current version and see if you're still having the problem. Mine is working as expected and I've tried with both https: and http: and both seem to work.


Yes, with 1.0.17 it tells me that it's current, so the check for updates works.

-Mike

Posted on
Wed May 17, 2017 3:55 am
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

Great, thanks.


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Posted on
Wed May 17, 2017 6:24 am
wideglidejrp offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

I respect the concern about Pandora's box in the pool again. However, I think things could be simplified with regard to units of measure. For example,

Temperature: C, F, or none

Rounding: yes, or no

Wind speed: miles per hour, kilometers per hour, or none

Rounding: yes or no

This capability would make it very easy to create Ivona or other text to speech announcements from the weather underground data retrieved by the plug-in which would be easier to listen to.

John R Patrick
Author of
Home Attitude

Posted on
Wed May 17, 2017 7:57 am
wideglidejrp offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

Thinking about this further, I see great potential for your plugin to be a great driver for announced weather information. Communicating by announcement instead of text implies a different protocol, seems to me. For example, when announcing the temperature:

By text: he 60 F.
By voice: 60 degrees.

I know these things can be done by script, but to get wide adoption, it would be much better to have some settings possible per my earlier suggestion.

John R Patrick
Author of
Home Attitude

Posted on
Wed May 17, 2017 11:50 am
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

Thanks John.

Indigo has a facility for two values associated with a device state: its 'true' value and its UI value (used for display in control pages and Indigo's UI). I have several settings built into the plugin to allow for formulation of certain values such as temperature, wind, pressure and so on for their precision and units. Values that are contained within strings are not currently affected by these settings.

I could add a feature to adjust the string values with these same settings, but that would be tricky to do when I don't know what the construction of the string is going to be with any certainty. I could do some regex substitutions like above, but I wouldn't feel confident that I was always doing it properly--especially given the multitude of languages that the plugin is designed to work with. This is further complicated by the fact that these strings can be associated with many different device types and states. Writing regexes to handle all the possible combinations is probably possible, but seems dangerous to me. I could add new states that contain the modified values, but this still doesn't contain the potential danger.

After giving your suggestion some thought, however, I may have come up with an alternative that might fit the bill. See if this makes any sense to you. I would create a new device type--WUnderground Announcements--that would be dedicated to this purpose. It would allow users to create custom announcements using builtin Indigo substitutions while leaving the underlying data unchanged. An example construction would be something like this:

Code: Select all
It is currently %%d:12345678:temp%% degrees and %%d:12345678:currentWeather%%. Today's temperature is forecast to be %%d:12345678:foreHigh1%% degrees and there is a %%d:12345678:forePop1%% percent chance of rain.
Tomorrow's forecast is for a high of %%d:12345678:foreHigh2%% with a %%d:12345678:forePop2%% chance of precipitation.

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Posted on
Wed May 17, 2017 1:09 pm
jalves offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

I like that suggestion Dave!

Running Indigo 2023.2 on a 24" iMac M1), OS X 14.4
Jeff

Posted on
Wed May 17, 2017 1:15 pm
wideglidejrp offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

I think you are on to a good concept. I believe the key to widespread use over time will be the announcement capability for forecast and alerts. The Sonos plugin is the best way to announce, in my opinion. Nick Lagaros has a wonderful plugin which fully controls Sonos, including for announcements either by MP3 or by Ivona. I use Ivona, but Amazon purchased them and is redoing it as an AWS service called Polly. Looks incredibly easy to use, but not sure what Nick's plans are to integrate it. An alternative is to just play the MP3 Polly creates. So the idea would be to use the new device type you describe and feed that to Polly and then place the resulting MP3 file in the Sonos mp3 folder as the latest forecast.

John R Patrick
Author of
Home Attitude

Posted on
Fri May 26, 2017 9:46 am
wideglidejrp offline
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Re: Weather Underground Plugin

Been giving some thought to the potential for a WU Announcements Plugin option. I just saw a survey showing the #1 reason people use Alexa, Siri, etc. Is to play music, but #2 was to announce weather information. This seems quite natural, with voice becoming more dominant in our digital lives. The Ivona option in Nick Lagaros's Sonos plugin opened my eyes to how pleasant announcements can be, much more so than normal text to speech. Unfortunately, Ivona will be shut down at the end of June, to be replaced by Polly. However, Nick's plugin does not support Polly. Here are a few thoughts on an alternative approach. I preface this assuming Polly will be a free AWS service for single person use. Not certain that is true.

The main difference I envision with an announcement plugin compared to the current plugin is in the text construction. Here is what I would love to see:

1. User selectable tokens such as ...
Opening tokens: "Good morning", "Good afternoon", "Good evening", "Attention: Weather Alert"
Closing tokens: "Have a good day in Philadelphia", "Have a good one", "Weather alert over"

2. User selectable units of measure...
F, C, None. This is important because of the difference between text announcements and voice announcements. For text it is natural to read "High will be 70 F", but for voice the F sounds out of place.

Miles per hour, Knots, None. To instead of dash. "The wind will be 15 to 20", or "The wind will be 15 to 20 miles per hour".

There may be other similar weather terms which would be different in voice than in text.

3. The plugin would create a text string from the tokens and forecast or alert information. The string would be submitted to AWS/Polly, which would then deliver an MP3 to the Sonos plugin folder or other user specified folder.

4. An Action would execute the Sonos plugin to play the MP3. For those without Sonos, I am sure there are alternatives for playing the MP3.

I have no idea how to do the AWS/Polly part of this idea, but I think it would be worthwhile. The Ivona/Polly technology is highly customizable with different voices and styles. It produces very natural sounding voice announcements.

John R Patrick
Author of
Home Attitude

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