[mh] Weather Alerts

[Brent D. <br...@de...>]

A dream of mine for years has been to have a weather radio that would output the SAME weather alert information to a serial port that I could then take specific action on in MH.

I've got a Radio Shack weather radio that has an external antenna jack hooked up to an antenna in my attic, an audio-output tied into the home speaker system system and a dry-contact output connected to a Weeder Digital I/O board to let MH know that /something/ weather-related is happening, but of course it's just a simple on/off indicator. (Sadly it looks like R/S no longer manufacturers a weather radio with all of these features.)

What I've been doing is if a weather alert occurs during the day (dry contact) the audio system switches to the weather radio and plays it over all the room speakers for 2 minutes. At night it's the same except it only plays in the master bedroom where my wife and I are.

Down side to this is that even with the appropriate SAME county codes programmed into the radio we still get woken up too often for non-critical alerts at night this I usually do want to hear during daytime hours.

The only solutions I had found were on the expensive side, some required you to have a VHF radio receiver to work with while others had antiquated and/or windows-only software.

A couple of days ago I was exploring this topic again (getting ready for midwest severe weather time) and stumbled across a post where a guy had developed a simple detector circuit from a couple of XR-2211 chips and a handful of other discrete parts and an associated Arduino library for parsing the actual message information out. Saturday I ordered the parts from Mouser (~$20), they arrived yesterday and I build the circuit today. Since I already had the Arduino with an ethernet shield and the weather radio this was really my only expense. I bench-tested with a couple of sample WAV files (download from http://www.thuneagle.com/testaudiofiles.htm) and it passed the smoke test and worked perfectly the first time, logging the SAME message to the serial port monitor. I spent a couple hours writing a sketch to send the data to MH in an easily-decoded format via TCP and another 1/2 hour setting up the MH code like I wanted. I then hooked up the circuit to the weather radio in my Node-0 closet with a "Y" audio cable, and promptly at 7:00 PM tonight I was notified via my internal Jabber server of the weekly NWS test. The nice thing was that since it was a test the logic I added in MH did NOT play the audio over the house speakers!

A simplification of the logic I'm using is:

Tests:
	Jabber IM only
Watch:
	Jabber
	Text Message
	All House speakers for 2 minutes 7am-10pm
Warning:
	Jabber
	Text Message
	All House speakers for 2 minutes 7am-10pm, 
	Master bedroom house speakers for 2 minutes 10pm-7am

There is additional logic for filtering the messages based on the SAME county code, watch alerts are considered for certain surrounding counties, warnings are considered for a smaller subset of those counties (and of course my own).

Anyway, if anyone is interested the schematic and library are available for free download from:

http://www.raydees.com/Weather_Radio.html

And in case anyone is wondering, I avoid the "cloud" or any type of internet-based service for anything critical or semi-critical/important like this.

Since I can't help with the big Insteon push I figured I'd try and contribute something useful…

Brent