Weather Alert???

[briands]

Thought I'd throw this out to the brilliant minds that are the STVi development community to see what might shake out.

We were minding our business watching timeshifted TV last night (as always) when suddenly the power sagged enough to restart my sage client computer. After grumbling about not picking up one of those $9.00 UPS from CompUSA, and while the client was rebooting, I switched the TV over and found that we were in the midst of a tornado warning This is especially scary when we are watching in the basement while the kids are sleeping on the second floor.

I did a little research and found that the National weather service has RSS and CAP (Common Alerting Protocol ) feeds. These CAP feeds have fields for Area as well as urgency, severity and certainty that could be configured to define the type of response. The information to display would be in the Effective, Expires, headline and Description field. I wonder if this could use the Caller ID popup window to display the information.

I think this may become a more common issue as more people timeshift their viewing.

[Kirby]

Good idea.. I would think it could be incorporated into either YAC or something very similar. I would use it for sure!

[jagee23]

Hi BrianDS,
Hope all is well up your way. I live in the Dyersburg - Newbern TN area and we got hit pretty hard....Scarry and tragic night for a lot of people here. I didnt have any damages to my property but a lot of people I know and work with had damages...and even family losses.

Anyways, I think this would also be a great idea....since we live in "Nader Alley"

[briands]

Thanks Jagee.

Everyone I know is OK, the storm actually blew through pretty quickly and the tornados dropped a little east of here.

So, three for... any developers out there interested???

[max8061]

Yes, seeing as how I am right now under a tornado warning that I didn't know about until walking into another room where someone was watching a non-dvr'd TV - I think this is a grand idea that can save lives. Seems like good motivation.

[briands]

Well, after a little more research into the Information Popup Utility(IPU), it looks like we need a freestanding application to send a message to the IPU on the port (or ports for multiple MVPs).

This application would need to:
download the CAP file at a certain interval
compare it to the Notification Criteria (configurable)
Store the details (expiration, Headline, description) to determine if it is a new alert
Send message to IPU

Some other thoughts...
Update frequency could increase if there is an active alert(expires time has not passed)
Graphic icons for each type of alert (Tornado warning, Tornado Watch , Winter Storm, Hale, Ice) If these were passed as the "name" argument to IPU, then just creating like named graphics would take care of that part.
Event types must be configurable because there was one this evening -

9 PM TO 3 AM...PARTLY CLOUDY. LOWS IN THE LOWER 50S. LIGHT AND
VARIABLE WINDS.
3 AM TO 9 AM...PARTLY CLOUDY. SOUTH WINDS AROUND 10 MPH

This "Short term forecast" is not something I would want to pop up.

A crawler would be neat after an active alert has been acknowledged, but that is another thing altogether.

[Kirby]

I really like the idea of having some custom weather alert icons showing up in a corner somewhere. Not sure how feasible it would be to do, but something that could have a decent amount of transparency and maybe be a selectable object that could then activate a text scroll for the alert. Something like this would be a very cool app IMO.

[aperry]

Oh, c'mon, this time of year, one quarter of the screen on all my locals is taken up with a weather map showing watches/warnings... Seriously though, this sounds like a pretty good idea. As long as it doesn't get too much "in the way", I'll probably install it once it is available.

[Kirby]

Hell you have it good. Some of the local HD channels here actually switch back to carrying the SD feed during the ENTIRE weather event, because they dont have the necessary equipment to put weather alerts on the HD feed!

My thinking was something very small, maybe say the size of a "reasonable" channel logo, and gray color, maybe a little heavier on the transparency. Then you could program that to pop up whereever you want maybe, and have it selectable to give more info.

[dblaine2]

That is a great idea! I would beta test if someone develops

[briands]

Not an end all solution, but Dirk's RSS is a start for getting weather alerts.

If you locate the appropriate RSS feed for your state/ county at the National Weather Service and set up the feed to display on all screens and the OSD, it will suffice.

I asked Dirk for some additional functionality to allow these feeds to be treated differently than other RSS feeds, we'll see what he comes up with.

Now I just need some bad weather to test it out