Betabrite Time and Temperature

This script gets weather info from NOAA and stores the data in STRING files on the Betabrite sign. By default, it only stores the temperature, but you can also get other weather data.

Requirements

• BBXML
• Perl, with module: Geo::METAR

Setup

This script writes to a STRING file with the label, "t". In order to display the temperature, you will also need to create a TEXT file. See the User's Guide for details. For example, add this textConfig and stringConfig to your memoryConfig document.

<alphasign>
  <memoryConfig>
    <textConfig label="T" size="25"/>
    <stringConfig label="t" size="6"/>
  </memoryConfig>
</alphasign>

Then send this text message to the sign to display the time and temperature.

<alphasign>
  <text label="T">
    <mode display="hold"/>
    <orange/><callString label="t"/>
    <extendedChar offset="49"/>F   <dimred/><time/>
  </text>
</alphasign>

After that, you need to run the bbweather script to set the value of the "t" STRING file in the sign.

Running It

Run the bbweather script to get the temperature from NOAA. The script takes one argument: the ICAO Location Indicator. You can search for your local ICAO code at the NOAA web site. Example:

The output is an XML document.

<alphasign>
  <string label="t">41</string>
</alphasign>

Pass that to bbxml to send it to the Betabrite sign.

Suggestions

You can edit the bbweather script to read other fields, such as wind speed and direction, dew point, etc. First, run it with the --dump option to see what fields are available. There are some comments in the script to show you how to add the new fields.

To make the updates automatic, create a cron job to run the script periodically.