computoman

A while back I had developed a way to download weather maps and then convert them to ascii for use on text only terminal or character lcd’s Made a modification or two in some of the code. As you remember we modified the crontab file so the system would download radar images once a minute. Crontab: Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron. # # Each task to run has to be defined through a single line # indicating with different fields when the task will be run # and what command to run for the task # # To define the time you can provide concrete values for # minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon), # and day of week (dow) or use ‘*’ in these fields (for ‘any’).# # Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron’s system # daemon’s notion of time and timezones. # # Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through # email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected). # # For example, you can run a backup of al...

Once in a while I sort of come up with a neat idea. At least it is to me. Just because you have an old system, does not mean you can not teach it new tricks. Done a lot of page scraping to get weather details, but it would be nice to use radar screens from the command line. So details in this case are not so necessary. The overall view of the weather to see what kinds of weather fronts are approaching is. Here we go. We need to collect some historical data (i.e. radar screens). You can get these from the radar.weather.gov using the 3 letter designation for the area you are interested in. For example, I believe the Dallas Fort Worth area is supposed to be FWS. You do not have to collect data just for your area. Collect data for several areas and get an overview of the weather all around. (http://www.leonardsguide.com/us-airport-codes.shtml) You need to collect data. Cron is the perfect tool for the job. We need to create a batch file that will collect the pictures usin...