Comments on: The Asterisk Weather Station: Forecasts from Any Phone for 42,740 U.S. Zip Codes

By: Tiggerpaws

Tiggerpaws — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:18:07 +0000

Why doesn't it work on Asterisk 1.6.0.22-samy-r60 currently running on trixbox1? [WM: Try replacing all | characters in /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf with commas. Then restart Asterisk.]

By: Grayson Peddie

Grayson Peddie — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:21:20 +0000

I already have eSpeak and asterisk-espeak installed and I want to use espeak instead of swift (don’t know about free voices for swift) or flite.

I got espeak to work by creating a simple custom extension:

[espeak-test]
exten => s,1,Answer
exten => s,2,eSpeak("This is a test.")
exten => s,3,Hangup

How do I modify the php file to get espeak to work?

I will try to install flite (I dislike the sound of speech) in the meantime.

By: Hierzu

Hierzu — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:42:00 +0000

I receive a beep and there is silence. I noticed the script is running while watching the asterisk console, so I went ahead and input a zip code and after a few seconds the report began playing. Any idea of what would cause the prompts to not to be played?

[WM: Be sure your have the correct TTS engine set in both the dialplan and the AGI script.]

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 10:21:51 +0000

Weather works perfect. Thanks for a neat extension!
RCD

By: HHB

HHB — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 03:16:01 +0000

Hello again. Since I posted the above in February about not being able to make nv-weather-zip.php work on the Asterisk 1.2.11, have checked out agi scripting in general, ran into phpagi stuff, and even though there were no includes for it on the nv-weather-zip.php script page, had read that elsewhere that it used phpagi. Had previously installed the zipcodes db, so decided to try it all again.

Added an include for phpagi.php, configured the phpagi.conf to use the 8kHz cepstral voice here, and YES, all works A+. Can even adjust the voice lexicon, etc. Thank you for this scripting, which appears quite complicated ….

HHB

By: HHB

HHB — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 08:59:54 +0000

Thank you for this program, but I cannot yet make it work on a Linux !686 RedHat Enterprise (2.4 kernel) with Asterisk 1.2.11. Used install instructions from here for the two flite apps. Asterisk tells me it's registered. DB installed, nv-weather-zip.php has correct mysql connection data. Flite speaks the words from the dial plan, but after a 30-second or so wait, no weather report is returned and a busy signal. When trying to chown nv-weather-zip.php and tts as per instructions, command line gives "invalid user" error. /var/log/asterisk/messages records "app_flite.c: Flite: No such configuration file flite.conf," and "app_playback.c: Playback requires an argument (filename)." I even tried removing the rpms to reinstall, but server says they are NOT installed. Yet trying to reinstall them, server says "already installed." Any clues for a confused newbie will be greatly appreciated. Thanks -- HHB

By: lim

lim — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:18:12 +0000

I don’t remember where I stole this from ( I think it was
michigan telephone) but this is another
way to do the weather using another website:

exten => 612,1,Answer
exten => 612,2,Wait(1)
exten => 612,3,DigitTimeout(7)
exten => 612,4,ResponseTimeout(10)
exten => 612,5,Flite("At the beep enter the five character zip code for the weather report you wish to retrieve.")
exten => 612,6,Read(APCODE,beep,5)
exten => 612,7,System(/usr/bin/curl -o /tmp/zip.mp3 -s http://audio.pirateweather.com/${APCODE}.mp3)
exten => 612,8,Flite("Please hold a moment while we contact the National Weather Service for your report.")
exten => 612,9,Wait(3)
exten => 612,10,Playback(/tmp/zip)
exten => 612,11,System(rm /tmp/zip.mp3 -f)
exten => 611,12,Hangup

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 04:43:23 +0000

Hey from frigid Wisconsin! Sweet concept. I’m using it for a local baseball league hotline (when it warms up this spring). Instead of the clunkiness of inputting a zip code, I’m just polling for my zip…
exten => 947,8,AGI(nv-weather-zip.php|${53185})
Here’s cookie you can help me help me chew on… update the weather a few times in the afternoon to prerecord the conditions and forecast. Coaches and parents want to know what’s up for their 6 and 8 pm games, they can dial in and simply listen to what the national weather service said last hour. Any takers?

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 02:17:33 +0000

Ward, it looks like the weather app may be broken after upgrading to trixbox 2.0. I tried reinstalling as well, but when requesting the report it says successfully downloaded, then there is about a 5 second delay and then it hangs up. Can you verify this? [WM: I'm staying away from 2.0 for a while for a whole host of reasons. It breaks lots of things so I'm not surprised.]

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:22:38 +0000

oops should’ve looked deeper the source is available on the sourceforge dialogpalette site:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dialogpalette/

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 19:01:43 +0000

Is there a powerpc and AMD64 version of app_flite.so? Can we get the source for it, if not?

By: UncleWard

UncleWard — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 12:26:26 +0000

A bug in the string manipulation functions caused the beginning of some weather reports to be garbled. Version 1.2 fixes it. After deleting the original nv-weather-zip.php file from your /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin directory, just download the nv-weather-zip.zip again and follow the original Asterisk Weather Station script installation instructions above. Our apologies.

By: dallas

dallas — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 07:52:52 +0000

I listened to your weather report by zip code and there is silence while it gets the report from the national weather service. Is there some way to play music while this is happening rather than silence? [WM: Not that we're aware of. Sorry.]

By: Jared Geiger

Jared Geiger — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 06:16:36 +0000

So my first comment was truncated. Here are the commands.

unzip zipcodes.zip
mysql -u root -ppassword < zipcodes1.sql
mysql -u root -ppassword < zipcodes2.sql
mkdir /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/tts
chown asterisk:asterisk /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/tts

Then edit the php file to the correct password for your mysql database in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/.

PS. The WEastern Standard Time VIRGINIA bug still exists from the file I downloaded today.

[WM: Thanks. We found the other half of the bug. Just download it one more time and all should be well in West Virginia. 50 lashes to the programming department. Ouch, ouch, ouch...]

By: Jared Geiger

Jared Geiger — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 19:33:12 +0000

There is also a bug. If you enter a West Virginia zip code such as 24740 when it reads back the file it replaces West Virginia with this "Summary: This National Weather Service update provided for PRINCETON, WEastern Standard Time. VIRGINIA." [WM: There was a math error (mine) in the original version of nv-weather-zip.php. Just download and install the script again to fix it.]

By: Jared Geiger

Jared Geiger — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 19:25:22 +0000

For those of you not using Trixbox but regular asterisk or with freepbx added on, you can download the zipped sql files and at a prompt type unzip zipcodes.zip then type mysql -u root -ppassword

That should make the script work for non trixbox users.

By: Bob Bacon

Bob Bacon — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:27:00 +0000

nice work. but when are you going to start phasing out deprecated commands like ResponseTimeout and DigitTimeout ? [WM: You don't want to get me started on deprecated commands. The basic problem is that using "new" commands breaks stuff for hundreds of thousands of folks using older versions of Asterisk. Supporting deprecated commands takes about one extra line of code per new invention so it's not a lot of overhead. And most folks don't swap out their phone system every time something "newer and better" gets released. Aren't you glad you asked?]

By: Fred Reitberger

Fred Reitberger — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 02:37:07 +0000

Great job! It worked exactly as described. Now what can I do to convince you to modify the script to use a Cepstal voice? (A donation is definately in order!)

By: JD

JD — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:24:50 +0000

I tried this with a bunch of AZ zipcodes, all of them say no weather information is currently available for phoenix arizona, have a nice day, goodbye. I tried Mesa, Chandler, Tempe, no dice on any of them. It works with 90210 though.

[WM: Glad the Valley Girls are working for you. But, believe it or not, even the National Weather Service has problems from time to time and usually on weekends. Chances are that all of the cities you tried are hosted on the same (dead) server. Once your friendly government workers make it to the office this morning, it probably will get fixed. Unfortunately, there are times when cities are down for days. And it should be noted that we look for Current Conditions and a Forecast. If either is missing, we give up. As the old saying goes, "You get what you pay for." Finally, here's a web link to check whether weather info for a particular site is available. Just enter your zip code in place of the one for Mesa, AZ that is shown: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/port/port_zc.php?inputstring=85201 ]