Hello

I'm trying to create a synthesiser controlled by the weather... It sounds a bit mad but i think the results would be very interesting.

Im pretty new to PD having only created very basic generative synths, but i enjoy a challenge.

I've thought about buying a cheap weather station ( http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=220865 ) and somehow connecting all sensors to my laptop and manipulate the incoming data.

Another option is to receive RSS feeds but ive read there is no easy way to do this PD

My last option is to use an open source weather monitoring software. A bit like this one - http://heat-meteo.sourceforge.net/ . I have no idea how i would receive information from this in to pure data.

Please help!

This is a great idea, so I did a little digging to help you on your way.

I love the idea of having a home weather kit, since it sends wireless information, I guess you only need to pick up the information on your computer (as the monitor device would) and relay it out to Pd. You'd need to reverse engineer this as in my searching, I couldn't find anyone who already has. There are various ways to get data into Pd. create a script using any of the languages that your (Mac OS X) Terminal can interpret b(BASH, PHP, e.t.c.) . I think you have to write it to send messages to the 'Standard Output' or stdio or something, which you can then call from within pd using the object [shell]. OR... Write your program in C and then package it as an external for Pd. OR... Find something that can parse the data and send it forth using the OSC (Open Sound Control) protocol. Pd has objects that can utilize OSC.

So lets say we want to take our feed from weather.com or from one of the sites, we have to parse the information in PHP. This claims to do such, but many people complain it doesn't: http://53x11.com/blog/2005/04/15/Weathercom-XML-Parser-14.5 You would have to modify the above script, to, instead of writing out a file, to broadcast the information over OSC. There is an OSC class for PHP here: http://andy.schmeder.net/software/

Since the weather parser doesn't actually work, and weather.com only permits you to request data once every few minutes, you may find better luck on some of the other weather engines. Maybe yahoo has something for you to parse.

But then, after copious amounts of a head scratching and research, and some wisdom points later. You will have done it! (Plus learnt how to do some very basic PHP tweaking. which is cool).

Of course, meteorologist is open source, so you COULD tweak that to broadcast OSC, or ask/bounty the developer, but you won't have learnt anything along the way.

I hope this gets you started.

look at this thread from the pdlist:

http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2010-03/076397.html

"And here's a version that gets the latest solar wind speed from the ACE satellite...

Martin"

mvh

interesting. I had to rename attachment.bin to attachment.pd

And i don't seem to have the external [httpget] but i got around it by using

[curl http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/lists/ace/ace_swepam_1m.txt(
|
[shell]

on linux you would replace curl with wget

So a little searching, I found this: http://weather.elec.york.ac.uk/

York university obviously have some kind of backend scripting that writes to the html the weather data, in a very html readable way. This would be difficult (but i guess not impossible) to parse through Pd. But they probably have somewhere a list version, that their backend stuff refers to, in order to parse and translate into html. So if you can get hold of that list, you should be ready to rock, presuming you want to make york based weather music.

I'll give the uni a call tomorrow (if i can remember) and see if that yields any results

@arif said:

So a little searching, I found this: http://weather.elec.york.ac.uk/

York university obviously have some kind of backend scripting that writes to the html the weather data, in a very html readable way. This would be difficult (but i guess not impossible) to parse through Pd. But they probably have somewhere a list version, that their backend stuff refers to, in order to parse and translate into html. So if you can get hold of that list, you should be ready to rock, presuming you want to make york based weather music.

I'll give the uni a call tomorrow (if i can remember) and see if that yields any results

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this. I got linked to this thread when I wanted to do some Twitter/Pd parsing and ended up sonifying/visualising the weather data on the York Uni site.