For reasons I am not going to discuses here, I have mostly moved a lot of my chats over to Telegram.
I have the app on my phone and the stand alone apps on my computer(s) and laptop.
The notifications show up on my Garmin watch nicely, so that is pretty much perfect.
The kicker however was a little unexpected… Node-RED has a really sweet bot Node.
Most of this week as been spent mucking about in Node-RED building bot commands.
//bot metar kphx – Show metar for airport code
/bot taf klax – Show TAF for airport code
/bot strikeaus – Show lightening map for AUS (wait 10 sec)
/bot strikeusa – Show lightening map for West-USA (wait 10 sec)
/bot map – Show current global ADSC aircraft
/bot whereis ae5bc3 – Show current location of ICAO code aircraft
/bot eq – Show last three earthquakes from USGS
/bot news – Show top three headlines from BBC
/bot tz – Show UTC, Aust, CA time zones
/bot ip – Show Ben’s IP address
/bot sleep – The couch got me
That’s what we have thus far.
I’d like to flesh out the METAR and TAF. METAR is the airport weather right now, TAF is the airport forecast.
At the moment the METAR has the basics formatted pretty good, but TAF is a bit trickier. At the moment it comes into Node-RED as HTML, but the bot does not support all the tags in the page, so I am mucking about with it.
That’s a screenshot showing two of the commands, just to give you a visual feel for what it looks like and how it works.
The first is asking for the lightening radar over the West Coast of the USA. (I also have one for Australia).
The next image is me asking the bot where a specific aircraft is. (Well, its last reported position).
I am slowly adding commands to the bot as it makes sense and as my coding skills can cope.
Anyway, that’s what the week has been about.
