2023-02-15, 01:40
Hey folks
Bit of OzWeather news. There are some alarming signs the API that OzWeather uses (...as do a whole host of other weather things...) - might be going away in March 2023. This is....a long way from ideal. I mean, the BOMs government mandated role is to supply accurate weather info to the Australian population, but they have a long term bad/closed attitude about how they do that.
(I noticed this via an issue on the BOM Home Assistant card I imagine some of you are using - https://github.com/Makin-Things/bom-rada.../issues/29 - if anyone has any resources/ideas to contribute, that would be a good place!).
This may then require a re-engineer of OzWeather (for about the 4th time in the 12 odd years of OzWeather's history, sigh...). I am not aware of any other open API from the BOM. So it may mean a return to scraping (of the 'new' weather 'places' I guess - http://www.bom.gov.au/places/ ?), ...which is actually how OzWeather worked for about 10 of those 12 years.
I will bite the bullet and do that work, if required - but since I don't know for sure this is happening (is it just the public pages closing, or the API as well?? - I am not sure I can be motivated to pre-emptively do this work.
So - fair warning - there may be a period in March when OzWeather stops working, due to circumstances I can't control. My aim would be to have it back up and running (if I don't pre-emptively code this alternative path before then...) - within a couple of weeks from the date it breaks, if it indeed does do so. I'm still crossing my fingers it won't.
As it happens I have also been working on a side project that also uses BOM weather. It's a Kodi '2nd Screen' thing - something that shows time/weather info by default, and switches to an artwork + time remaining display when Kodi is playing any media. It's a simple web app, that cam be run on anything with a browser basically (except for iOS devices due to some annoying 'security' limits on local network access, sigh). So I use old/cheap tablets for this. (It's designed for a screen size of about 7 to 10 inches, and to be legible from a normal couch viewing distance of 3 to 5m). This _also_ uses this API, so would need to be fixed before I even publicly put it out there...kind of annoying, but there you go - always a risk with an undocumented open API, I suppose.
@DavidFW1960 You're normally well informed about this stuff - if you know any other good BOM weather data channels, now would be the time to let me know
Bit of OzWeather news. There are some alarming signs the API that OzWeather uses (...as do a whole host of other weather things...) - might be going away in March 2023. This is....a long way from ideal. I mean, the BOMs government mandated role is to supply accurate weather info to the Australian population, but they have a long term bad/closed attitude about how they do that.
(I noticed this via an issue on the BOM Home Assistant card I imagine some of you are using - https://github.com/Makin-Things/bom-rada.../issues/29 - if anyone has any resources/ideas to contribute, that would be a good place!).
This may then require a re-engineer of OzWeather (for about the 4th time in the 12 odd years of OzWeather's history, sigh...). I am not aware of any other open API from the BOM. So it may mean a return to scraping (of the 'new' weather 'places' I guess - http://www.bom.gov.au/places/ ?), ...which is actually how OzWeather worked for about 10 of those 12 years.
I will bite the bullet and do that work, if required - but since I don't know for sure this is happening (is it just the public pages closing, or the API as well?? - I am not sure I can be motivated to pre-emptively do this work.
So - fair warning - there may be a period in March when OzWeather stops working, due to circumstances I can't control. My aim would be to have it back up and running (if I don't pre-emptively code this alternative path before then...) - within a couple of weeks from the date it breaks, if it indeed does do so. I'm still crossing my fingers it won't.
As it happens I have also been working on a side project that also uses BOM weather. It's a Kodi '2nd Screen' thing - something that shows time/weather info by default, and switches to an artwork + time remaining display when Kodi is playing any media. It's a simple web app, that cam be run on anything with a browser basically (except for iOS devices due to some annoying 'security' limits on local network access, sigh). So I use old/cheap tablets for this. (It's designed for a screen size of about 7 to 10 inches, and to be legible from a normal couch viewing distance of 3 to 5m). This _also_ uses this API, so would need to be fixed before I even publicly put it out there...kind of annoying, but there you go - always a risk with an undocumented open API, I suppose.
@DavidFW1960 You're normally well informed about this stuff - if you know any other good BOM weather data channels, now would be the time to let me know
