Comments on: Programmer’s Corner: Asterisk Weather Station Updates

By: Rod

Rod — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 20:32:38 +0000

Could someone who has modified the "nv-weather-zip.php" to support the Allison-8khz Cepstral voice post the steps needed?

Thanks

By: vadim

vadim — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:08:37 +0000

In the CLI I see the following:
——————————————
— Executing AGI("SIP/220-09c04be0″, "nv-weather-zip.php|10118″) in new stack
— Launched AGI Script /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/nv-weather-zip.php
— AGI Script nv-weather-zip.php completed, returning 0
— Executing NoOp("SIP/220-09c04be0″, "Wave file: ") in new stack
— Executing Playback("SIP/220-09c04be0″, "") in new stack
== Spawn extension (from-internal, 947, 10) exited non-zero on ‘SIP/220-09c04be0’
— Executing Macro("SIP/220-09c04be0″, "hangupcall") in new stack
——————————

looks like WAV file is missing – Any idea why?

[WM: Are you sure you installed the original Weather Station by ZIP Code application? You can’t update something that was never installed. Just reinstall the application from the Best of Nerd Vittles site.]

By: vadim

vadim — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 19:50:46 +0000

Is it broken again? I can hear silence for few secs and then it disconnects.

[WM: Works fine. Check the Asterisk CLI for errors.]

By: versodom

versodom — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 17:28:21 +0000

Weather by Zip is broken again. They added more XML tags and data. Should be a simple fix.

[WM: Yeah. They broke both the Weather by ZIP and Weather by Airport Code apps. Just download and reinstall the nv-weather-zip.zip and nv-weather2.zip files from Best of Nerd Vittles and you’ll be back in business. Thanks for the heads up.]

By: Tom Schmitt

Tom Schmitt — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:45:52 +0000

Thanks to you and your web site Nerd Vittles for the fine application(s) and updates. Thanks to Lee Winsor above solving the password problem.
I also noticed that the weather.agi ‘*61’ in asterisk was not working. So I brought up the web page http://weather.noaa.gov and found that the ftp site for has been moved to "tgftp.nws.noaa.gov". When I change the /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/weather.agi file accordingly, all is now working.
Thanks again for the great applications.

By: Lee Winsor

Lee Winsor — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 21:55:36 +0000

After a frustrating couple of days of getting long delays followed by ‘fast busy’ after entering the zip code, I finally read through your code and found out why it wasn’t working for me.

If you’ve changed your root mysql password to increase security, you’ll need to change the password in the php script to match your new one (a search for ‘passw0rd’ will find the entry in the script). Once changed, the script work fine.

[WM: Unless your Asterisk server is physically vulnerable, there is NO REASON to change the root MySQL password since it only permits access from localhost. As with all software, once you customize your setup, you’ve got to find the wrinkles your setup causes. That’s not a bad thing. But it’s something to consider before making customizations.]

By: Glen Bernstein

Glen Bernstein — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:24:09 +0000

You asked for a distance between 2 cities, here is one… it assumes that there are 2 cities and their web pages have been loaded into the 2 variables $city1value and $city2value. The output is a simple message "Distance x miles". One can obviously elaborate from here.

The program uses a ‘simple’ great circle algorithm with the ‘assumption’ that the earth has a radius of 3693 miles. If you want kilometers, just change this to the radius in kilometers – 6378 (and the output of ‘miles’ to ‘kilometers’).

$latpos = strpos($city1value, "Lat: ") + 4;
$lonpos = strpos($city1value, "Lon: ", $latpos) + 4;
$elepos = strpos($city1value, "Elev: ", $lonpos) + 5;
$endpos = strpos($city1value, "", $elepos) + 3;

$city1lat = substr($city1value, $latpos, $lonpos – $latpos – 4);
$city1lon = substr($city1value, $lonpos, $elepos – $lonpos – 5);
$city1ele = substr($city1value, $elepos, $endpos – $elepos – 3);

$latpos = strpos($city2value, "Lat: ") + 4;
$lonpos = strpos($city2value, "Lon: ", $latpos) + 4;
$elepos = strpos($city2value, "Elev: ", $lonpos) + 5;
$endpos = strpos($city2value, "", $elepos) + 3;

$city2lat = substr($city2value, $latpos, $lonpos – $latpos – 4);
$city2lon = substr($city2value, $lonpos, $elepos – $lonpos – 5);
$city2ele = substr($city2value, $elepos, $endpos – $elepos – 3);

$radius = 3963; # Earth’s Radius in Miles

$distance = $radius * acos((sin(deg2rad($city1lat)) * sin(deg2rad($city2lat))) + (cos(deg2rad($city1lat)) * cos(deg2rad($city2lat)) * cos(deg2rad($city2lon) – deg2rad($city1lon))));

print ‘Distance: ‘. $distance .’miles’;

[WM: Looks like we already have a winner unless I’ve missed something. Thanks, Glen.]

By: Kristopher

Kristopher — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:34:54 +0000

Kudos on yet another fantastic Asterisk addition, NV crew!

In a related topic, I had noticed a set of recordings included in the Trixbox sounds that pertain to weather. However, there doesn’t seem to be any application out there that takes advantage of these. Is there a known parser or converter of some sort that can string these together to speak weather conditions using Allison’s voice? Going a step further, is there a parser that can take advantage of the included recorded phoneme groups? Although Flite and especially Cepstral are good and very useful speech synths, it would be neat to put the human-recorded voices to use. Any thoughts?

Very respectfully,
Kris