NOAA Weather Plus v1.1.12

(FREE Indigo Pro 5 and 6 Plugin)

Download version 1.1.12 here

WARNING: Version 1.1 changes almost all weather forecast state names to be more intuitive. This has the unfortunate side-effect of causing any Device State Change triggers based on old forecast states to no longer work and Control Page objects you may have to not appear correctly until set to show the new forecast states.

The NOAA Weather Plus plugin extends the functionality of Perceptive Automation's Indigo Pro (versions 5.0 and higher) home automation software by allowing you to create an Indigo device that contains weather information for your geographic location. Current weather conditions and a 7-day forecast for your location are gathered from the US National Weather Service (a department of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

Indigo Pro includes a built-in NOAA Weather plugin. However, NOAA Weather Plus goes beyond the functionality of the included NOAA Weather plugin by adding the following features.

• Use your exact geographic latitude and longitude to gather weather information rather than needing to look up your local NOAA weather observation station name.
• 7-day forecasts for morning and evening weather conditions.
• Forecasts include probability of precipitation.
• Forecasts include the weather condition icon state for use in Indigo Pro control pages.
• Forecasts include NOAA's plain-English worded weather predictions for each morning and evenin period.
• 7-day high and low temperature predictions.
• Weather advisories, including start and end dates, are shown in separate device states.
• Current wind chill factor temperature is provided based on observed wind speed in your location (if provided by NOAA).
• Current water temperature if the NOAA weather stations at sea provides that information.
• NOAA Weather Plus device states are backward compatible* with Indigo's included NOAA Weather plugin states, so there's no need to delete existing NOAA Weather devices. Just re-configure them to use the NOAA Weather Plus plugin.
• Improved current condition data reliability. If a current condition is unavailable from the primary data source, NOAA Weather Plus attempts to use data from a secondary data source (the source used by Perceptive Automation's include NOAA Weather plugin).
• NOAA Weather Plus devices refresh weather data from NOAA servers every 15 minutes rather than every 30 minutes like the included NOAA Weather plugin.

Installation

Use the download link above to download the latest version of the plugin. Once downloaded, it should automatically unzip, but if it doesn't double-click the zip file to decompress it. If you downloaded the plugin from a computer other than your Indigo server computer, move the plugin file to any location on your Indigo server. Once decompressed and moved to the computer with the Indigo server running, double-click the "NOAA Weather Plus.indigoPlugin" icon. You should be prompted to install and configure the plugin. The only global plugin configuration is the option to turn debug logging on or off (it's off by default). Simply click "Save" to continue. The plugin is installed.

Using It

Use NOAA Weather Plus by creating a new Indigo device within the Indigo client. Within the Devices section of the Indigo client, click the "New..." button. Name the device (perhaps "My Weather"). Select "Plugin" as the device Type. Select "NOAA Weather Plus" as the Plugin. Select "Weather Locale" as the Model. A configuration dialog will appear. Enter the geographic latitude and longitude coordinates of the location for which you'd like to monitor weather conditions and forecast information. (Of course, weather data is limited to that gathered by the US National Weather Service, so coordinates outside the US will either result in an error or very limited data). If you don't know your geographic coordinates, you can click on the "Find My Location Info" button (only works on the Indigo server machine) to open your web browser to Perceptive Automation's suggested location lookup site links.

Version 1.1.12 change: Added more debugging to and updated wind chill calculation algorithm. It now uses the alternate weather information for calculations if needed. Made the alternate data gathering and parsing more efficient.


* NOAA Weather Plus does not contain the following states that do exist in the included NOAA Weather plugin: dewPointString, heatIndexString, temperatureString, windString. Additionally, all measurements are rounded to a realistic (lower) level of precission to more accurately reflect measured values coming from NOAA (e.g. temperatures do not contain decimal values).

Great -- thanks for contributing it!

Take a look at this API:

Code: Select all

indigo.server.getLatitudeAndLongitude()

You should be able to pre-populate the device UI with some good defaults from the results.

matt (support) wrote:Take a look at this API:

Code: Select all

indigo.server.getLatitudeAndLongitude()

You should be able to pre-populate the device UI with some good defaults from the results.

Cool! I was wondering if there was a way to get location info from Indigo. Is there a way to pre-populate that information in the device configuration data fields on a first-time setup?

Yep. Untested, but something like:

Code: Select all

   def getDeviceConfigUiValues(self, pluginProps, typeId, devId):
      errorMsgDict = indigo.Dict()
      valuesDict = pluginProps
      (valuesDict["lat"], valuesDict["long"]) = indigo.server.getLatitudeAndLongitude()
      return (valuesDict, errorMsgDict)

That isn't quite what you want since it will always override the value, but if you check for the existence of "lat" and "long" in pluginProps first, and only do the logic if they don't exist, then I think it will work.

Excellent! I'll test it out.

Thanks!

Yes, great addition to our plugin stable.

You might want to document what those fields are - the ones from our plugin are fairly self-explanatory but you've added a bunch and they may not be as intuitive. You might also want to check to see if the states from the old device are in your device (maybe in the deviceCreated method) and if so remove them - otherwise when a user just updates an existing one those old states will hang around not being populated. Note, however, that the states that you dropped can easily be created - they are there to provide a convenient way to display data on a control page that is more complete than just the raw data.

FWIW, our NOAA plugin only refreshes every 30 minutes because the feed we are using is only updated hourly so refreshing any more often would be pointless. Your feed is probably updated more frequently so it makes sense to refresh more often.

Thanks Jay!

That's some good feedback. Yep, further documentation on the additional fields is certainly in order. I'm not sure how big the demand is for the additional data I've included in this plugin, but I figured most of those who wanted the additional data would be able to figure out what the new fields represent.

jay (support) wrote:You might also want to check to see if the states from the old device are in your device (maybe in the deviceCreated method) and if so remove them - otherwise when a user just updates an existing one those old states will hang around not being populated.

That's a good idea. I noticed this behavior when testing. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do that. By "deviceCreated" method, do you mean the __init__ method? I don't have a "deviceCreated" method defined. Perhaps that's part of the PluginBase? How would I grab the states from the old device? Would those be in the valuedDict, or maybe device.states[<state name>]? By "remove them" do you mean assign a "- data unavailable -" value to them or do you mean delete the state from the device altogether (if the latter, what method would do that, device.removeState() perhaps)? Thanks.

Yes, I knew the included NOAA Weather plugin only refreshed every 30 minutes because the feed it used was only refreshed every hour. The XML for the feed that it uses explicitly suggests a 60 minute refresh on the 15-past the hour mark. The XML used by this plugin doesn't explicitly recommend a refresh rate, so I just set one somewhat arbitrarily.

Actually, you don't need to call it - when the user switches the old device to the new one it should completely rebuild the state list when the device dialog is saved.

But, in any case, the deviceCreated() method (along with others) are documented in the plugin.py section of the developers guide.

Ah, good deal. Thanks for the link.

Version 1.1 Released!

See original post for download link.

WARNING: Version 1.1 changes almost all weather forecast state names to be more intuitive. This has the unfortunate side-effect of causing any Device State Change triggers based on old forecast states to no longer work and Control Page objects you may have to not appear correctly until set to show the new forecast states.

Major Changes to Version 1.1:

• Added 9 new device states for up to 3 weather advisories (weatherAdvisory1Text, weatherAdvisory1StartTime, and weatherAdvisory1EndTime, with the ...2... and ...3... versions).
• Changed almost all forecast state names both within the device definition and in the user interface to make it more clear what each state represents. Added code to "align" the high and low temperature forecasts with the bi-daily weather conditions.
• Rearranged the order of many of the state values in the user interface.
• Added code to attempt to find and download weather data from an alternate NOAA weather URL if the information doesn't exist in the primary XML data obtained. This is experimental and may not work for a number of locations.
• Changed what is inserted into states when data is unavailable. The "- data unavailable -" message will no longer appear in states that have no data. Instead, states will be blanked out (or set to zero, if it's a numeric state) when data is unavailable.
• Updated some error messages to indicate possible workarounds for parsing errors.

Patch update 1.1.4 released:

(See original post for download link).

Changes Since Version 1.1.3

Fixed bug that caused the observation time from the primary data source to always appear to be blank.

Patch update 1.1.5 released:

(See original post for download link).

Changes Since Version 1.1.4

Fixed a bug that caused an error if the moreWeatherInformation data did not exist in the data feed.

Patch update 1.1.6 released:

(See original post for download link).

Changes Since Version 1.1.5

Fixed a bug that would cause the runConcurrentThread to exit unexpectedly if the URL for the data was unreachable.