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DESIGN.md

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Design

Create a command line tool that can query the weather information needed to plan the routes.

Weather data needed:

  • temperature
  • wind direction
  • wind speed
  • sunset for location

Gathering this information consumes much of the time. Use weather APIs to collect this information and return it to the user in formatted text that can be posted to a forum or pasted in an email.

Requirements

The tool needs to output text for the event. In general the event postings need the following information:

Location of event, start time

Weather forcast for the time of the event.

Temperature, wind direction, chance of precipitation.

Sunset time to get an idea of how much daylight is available.

Optional comment.

Image for the event.

Closing statement or footer.

Templates

Templates are the easiest way to output structured text from an application. This application uses Jinja2 templates to replace sections of the templates when the program runs.

All the templates are stored in the templates directory and are named for the day of the week with lowercase letters. The program can load the appropriate template and replace the variables (mostly from the weather data) before printing the final text to the standard output. You can customize each day's templates with different messages so each day has its own message.

templates/monday
templates/wednesday

Images

One of the main motivations for this project is to automatically perform the tasks that someone else has to do weekly. The toughest part of scheduling the rides for our bicycle group is selecting a route on a map. There is a lot of different maps that already exist. The maps are named for the starting location and have the wind direction in the name, but beyond that the name seems random or arbitrary. I learned for the originator of this system that some maps of the same direction are different maximum distances based on how much daylight is available during that season.

This script to be fully automatic the maps names would have to be normalized to include the wind direction and contain some kind of maximum distance or perhaps some "t-shirt sizes" (Small, Medium, Large) designation.

http://images.com/BS_N_30minute_map.gif (short or small)
http://images.com/BS_E_27minute_map.gif (short or small)
http://images.com/BS_S_24minute_map.gif (short or small)
http://images.com/BS_W_32minute_map.gif (short or small)
http://images.com/BS_N_90minute_map.gif (medium)
http://images.com/BS_E_93minute_map.gif (medium)
http://images.com/BS_S_89minute_map.gif (medium)
http://images.com/BS_W_91minute_map.gif (medium)
http://images.com/BS_N_120minute_map.gif (long)
http://images.com/BS_E_120minute_map.gif (long)
http://images.com/BS_S_122minute_map.gif (long)
http://images.com/BS_W_119minute_map.gif (long)

Phase 1

  • Research the weather APIs to see which one provides what we need. Keep links to documentation in RESEARCH.md so when the APIs break or more functionality is needed the information is available.
  • Using the astronomy API for sunset time, and the hourly10day API for the hourly data.

Phase 2

  • Implement simple requests to gather the weather information.

    • Using the requests Python package to issue simple HTTP GET commands.
    • Parsing the JSON is the hardest part, saved JSON in the examples directory.

Phase 3

  • Make the system work from the command line with replaceable credentials that are not hard coded.

    • Both command line and interactive are supported.

Phase 4

  • Look into where to run this tool, likely a Raspberry Pi or something cheap and low powered that can run for a long time unattended.

Phase 5

  • Schedule the tool to run every night and post information to the group/forum or email.

Phase6

  • Release to production, maintain the tool by fixing bugs and adding features.