QML BOM: Weather on the go...

As part of my foray into n9 apps, a new one that displays information from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on the n9. Being pure QML + Javascript it also runs on the desktop. The forecasts include min and max temps, and for the Europeans reading this, the middle line "10..." is the UV prediction and roasting window for the day... all your sunscreen are belong to us.



Apart from saving a little on downloads for the topology and background images when on the move, you get to customize those as they are just png files living in the images subdirectory. So I have the local rocket launch site indicated. I'd like to make a LOTR style topology overlay, perhaps mt Glorious becomes Mordor?

Code available at https://github.com/monkeyiq/qmlbom

Take the Wrather With You...

If anyone in the maemo world knows of recent plasma packages for the n810, please drop a line or leave a comment linking to it from here.. The post is about Abomination, my perl/KDE4 code to grab and log data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and present it in an interesting way.

I notice that doppler wind is now available from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Also, I didn't notice the up to 512km composite rain maps before. The plan is to include support for both of these radar types into my KDE plasmoiods. I think having the doppler wind as a transparent overlay above the rainfall overlay would be quite telling, being able to see why clouds burst at given points.

Though this doesn't solve the deeper, more interesting question of if the system that is causing the interesting wind trend will remain for the next 2 hours while you are outside performing activity-Y and wanting to remain dry.

Plasma: Environmental Awareness

Last time around I mentioned the plasmoids I finally decided to write to show information from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, or BOM as it's lovingly known in some circles. I have put in place a few more touches to make it useful and have been experimenting with it since the last post. Shown below is the updated radar view which uses a custom background image and a modified locations overlay. The sat images are from Google Maps.

This gave me the idea that this particular plasmoid should be "Environmental" instead of just weather. If there is a crash on the north bound road that you use, seeing a little red dot there would be great. Having it pulse when you animate the radar would also be good so you have a much greater chance of seeing it. Likewise, for bus and train services, seeing which lines of interest are inactive due to track work or where delays are. It is more about showing things that are of interest today than just the weather.

I'm thinking that using Marble and Nepomuk (RDF) here would be the way to go. Telling marble that the doppler radar images are for dlong/dlat and extend to dlong/dlat should be OK for overlaying them. Nepomuk would be the way to go for harvesting the other information, like the delays or traffic reports and if they are properly geotagged, perhaps geo84, then a sparql should be able to bring them to the map. Of course, a timeline slider would then live on the top so you can see things that might have happened but been already resolved.

My mind's eye could see the benefit to the gust / average wind speed vs time plot plasmoid, but now that I have had it running for a while I can also show folks that I wanted... as you can see, looking at the plasmoid on the right, the red is the average wind speed and the blue extends to the gust speed. It becomes obvious not only if it is breezy, but if there is a large amount of variability in the wind. This metric is very important to some activities that are sensitive to wind. For weather geeks, the drop in wind should also show in the temp graph on the left because the apparent temp will alter as well. Though at 16C with winds < 10km/h it is to small to really see. BTW I know that the times are wrong in the title, there is an erroneous UTC offset happening to that epoch somewhere along the lines it seems.


I am not fully happy with the Forecast view. The icons and max temps for today and tomorrow are shown on the left and the detailed text on the right. It is very hard to show the detailed BOM text graphically, as things like "Chance of a late storm" require strange combinations of the "Fine" and "Storm" icons from the KDE set, and that doesn't take into account the "chance of" part in the text forecast.


These will likely be shoved into KDE's svn as aaron suggested. If anyone feels strongly _against_ that choice then please ping me, otherwise I'll assume sunshine and lolly pops.

Plasma: It's an abomination I tell's ya...

Now that I have your attention and defences up, abomination is the name of my new plasmoids for showing the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABOM) National weather info, thus it is an ABOMiNation. Yes, my humour is offered for free, though you die a little with each joke.

Things are split up into Perl scripts, data engines, and plasmoids. Its still version 0.0.1 so expect a reading of the README and a bit of tinkering to get going.

One of the nice things is that the radar image loop can be offered on the desktop with just the latest doppler radar overlay. As the background, topographic and locations are all separate PNGs you can easily get a custom look and feel or theme for your version too.


Observations are downloaded for your nominated cities. The observations plasmoid can show the ambient and apparent temperature, wind average and gust speeds, and rainfall on a rolling graph. These screenshots were taken with a sample time of 1 second and a random multiplier to test, in reality you should see nicer bell like curves for temps and less sporadic curves for wind. Seeing the gust as a cumulative on the same graph is handy for motorbike riders so you can see how "choppy" things are at a glance. Especially if you have observations for other places that you are heading towards which might be 100-200km away from your abode. For temps as shown below the -1 as the offset to apparent temp from ambient temp. The time is always when the latest observation was taken.

As you see below, the blue area is the gust speed above the average. So a variable wind will show up graphically. The direction is shown in the title along with the average and gust relative to avg speeds. I particularly hate the weather applets that show the direction as an arrow, and wind speed as a smaller number. Chewing up screen for something I don't care about and not showing detailed wind observations.


As this was my first foray into KDE applets, I found the many tutorials on DataEngine and Applets to be a good start, but there are still times when you have to RTFS and grep the subversion to work out how to do things. I still have another plasmoid to write but a release will happen very soon. I infact tried kde-apps.org today but its interface is annoying so I'll likely shove it up on sf.net in the next few days.