[aprssig] Crowdsourcing weather page

Steve Dimse steve at dimse.com
Mon Jan 27 11:44:39 EST 2014


I’m playing with doing a more modern-looking weather display for findU, and thought it might be fun to try a little crowdsourcing.

I want your idea for what a weather display should look like.

I can draw any truetype font, and pretty much any graphic I want within the cgi. For example here is a quick control panel that uses an LED font to show a few of the latest weather values for a station

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/panel.cgi?call=k4hg-2

This is not a finished product, it is an example, though I will end up with something like this as one of the options: a simple text display that can be read across the room suitable for surplus iPads, monitors, raspberry pi, etc. Expect this URL to change (definitely will have wind rose instead of cardinal text), have errors, or even disappear before it is officially released.

I’ve always tried to make findU be as readable as possible, I hate some of the weather client programs that fill the screen with oodles of complex looking widgets that obscure information. Here is an example of what I don’t like that uses way too much of findU’s resources. (There is no identifying info, so if this happens to be someone on the list, sorry, but you are the only one that knows!)

http://pinespantry.com/weather/Current_Vantage_Pro_Plus.htm

I like clean and easily readable displays with as much info “above the fold” as possible. This one, for example, uses three findU graphics down near the bottom of the page. It refreshes every 2.5 minutes, and in January so far it has loaded 28113 images, few of which were likely seen. I hate that!

So, send me ideas, mockups, or pet peeves for me to consider in this next display!

Thanks, Steve K4HG


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