Version 1.0 of Alphabrite LED Display Control Center—or, simply enough, Alphabrite v1.0—is ready for download. This application allows remote or local administration of your Alpha or Betabrite LED Display using PHP4 and 5 with the cURL extension. The application supports every sign that adheres to the Alpha 1.0 Protocol. (See README for more details.)

Available Modules:

• Public Interaction: Interface your LED sign to the Internet through your website. By only embedding two lines of code, you’ll have everything you need on the front-end to accept feedback—without interrupting the flow of your other active modules. Includes optional notification of messages by email and/or to its own Twitter feed.
• Stock Quotes: Define the stocks you want to watch and keep tabs on them through the ticker. (Stock quotes are on a 20-minute delay, so DON’T use it for determining whether to execute a trade.)
• Weather: Get Current Conditions for your ZIP code, as well as Local Forecasts for two days out.
• RSS Feeds: Define your feed and scan whatever headlines you feel like staying abreast of.
• Twitter Recapping: Create an account for your sign on Twitter and, in combination with the Public Interaction module, display both current and archived messages sent to your sign. Or, if you prefer, display your personal feed instead.
• Time/Date Display & Synchronization: For those, like me, without proper serial clock chips inside their Alpha or Betabrite unit, these functions will both display and regularly synchronize your time and date (on supported models).
• Basecamp Integration*: If you’re a user of Basecamp by 37signals, keep track of the latest activity through this module. Especially useful for Project Managers.
• IMAP Inbox Check*: Check how many unread messages you have, and how many messages you have total. This is pre-set to Gmail for your convenience.

Hardware Functions Provided:

• Set Date/Time, Set Day of the Week, Set Time Format, Schedule Messages, Speaker On/Off, Generate Tone, Clear Priority Message (A0), Clear Non-Priority Memory (page or entirely), Soft Reset, Set Sequence (Data Reset), Update Sequence (Data Refresh)
• Includes the PHP RS-232 method (alphawrite.php), which requires the fantastic and included ‘php_serial.class.php’ by Rémy Sanchez (http://hyperthese.net/).
• Furthermore, unit resets and refreshes can be automated via a simple crontab (or its Windows equivalent) using the provided utilities.

This was tested on an Alpha PPD220—a two-line, red LED display by Adaptive Displays. Should you run into any problems, please submit them here.

* See the README for important details and security caveats involved with the utilization of these modules.

Download: Alphabrite v1.0 (97kb, zip)

If you use and/or like what you see, consider clicking here to help fund further development.

With my other LED reverse-engineering project waiting on a cable, I picked up an Alpha PPD220 (Personal Priority Display) LED Sign—probably the most basic model there is in their product line—off eBay at about 15% of the MSRP. (I’d prefer a Alpha 4160C, but I’m pretty sure the WAF (wife acceptance factor) wouldn’t permit it.)

Telling by the message that was still in its memory when I powered it on, this particular LED sign used to serve as a display at a lottery terminal somewhere in South Carolina. Within an hour or so of hacking away on some code from these guys, however, I was able to interface it using PHP and Perl—the latter posing as the messenger with the RS-232 serial interface—to accept messages from the public at large.

So, with that done, it was time to improve upon it. In between moments of helping my wife recover from all four of her wisdom teeth being pulled, I decided to build a library (from scratch) for the sign. Because of the shared protocol, the library I have in development should work with most, if not all Alpha and Betabrite models from Adaptive Displays, but I really can’t test that to verify beyond this basic little unit.

Here’s a bit of what it does in its current state:

• Supports the Alpha 1.0 protocol mostly, with a little (untested) 2.0 and 3.0
• Accommodates both paged sequences (AA-AZ) and PRIORITY Text (A0)
• Synchronizes the system clock on the unit with the server automatically
• Pulls in RSS feeds using Simplepie
• Pulls in Current Weather and the Local Forecast via Yahoo’s API
• Allows people visiting my site to enter messages without interrupting the flow of information (news, weather, time, etc.)
• Added basic administrative functions (soft reset, speaker on/off, clear memory, etc.)
• Added the ability to update a Twitter account with the last submitted message from the web. Sad.
• Added the ability to notify me by email when someone submits a message. Doubly sad.
• Updates every hour on the hour via a crontab which refreshes all the data

There’s still a lot of work to be done to maximize its utility (and for me to be comfortable enough to release it), but I’ll get to it as time permits. As it is, it’s become something far more useful than displaying lottery numbers and jackpot totals.

Want to give it a whirl? Feel free to check the sign out over here and drop a note while you’re at it.

I’ve been playing a little bit^* with this expired and expiring domain script in my after-hours free time to get a good workout using SimplePie now that I’m pretty much ditching another parser at work. It’s pretty nifty, even though it isn’t 100% perfect.

Check it out and see if you can’t find something better for yourself than thisismydomainitreallyrockshellyeah.com.

* Ok, I totally rewrote it.

After climbing time and time again onto the hot tar-laden roof of our apartment for much testing, adjusting, and testing some more, I think I’ve finally finished both siting and futzing around with the weather station.

In the end, I ended up modifying the anemometer with a retrofitted RJ11-to-CAT5 solution (involving much splicing and soldering) that will prevent odd wind spikes into the 50-80mph range, and wrapped electrical tape around the body of the anemometer itself in order to prevent any light leakage from throwing off the directional sensor. All-in-all, everything seems to be working to its potential at this time. If you look at at this graphic from the 14th and note the wind direction from 3pm-6pm or so compared to today’s after 2pm (it was inside for testing before that time), you can definitely see a marked improvement in accuracy. (Hint: The wind isn’t incoming at 247 degrees (without deviation) around here for three hours straight. Ever.)

Some exciting developments are in the hopper for personal weather station owners, so stay tuned. For now, I can say that the staff of Weather Underground are among the most helpful, responsive, and friendly around.

Having downloaded and messed around with NuSOAP a bit, I think I’m going to restart one of my original ideas: to optionally pull and display 5-day forecasts using NWS4Cast. Of the mods I’ve seen performed to the script so far—primarily on academically-oriented astronomy sites—SOAP support for retrieving forecasts seems to be the most desired.

And so it shall be. Maybe I’ll have some time this weekend to get it running.

Much time has passed since the prior release of my NWS4Cast PHP Weather script. I spent some time rewriting a significant portion of the code to make it far more orderly in terms of separating methods from settings, which current users will find refreshing I’m sure.

I’ve also added icon support; various (overdue) fixes to XML node names; trimmed down the file size significantly; and tweaked some of the calcs. All-in-all, users should find this a much-improved release, and set-up should be considerably easier. As always, it’s Dreamhost-friendly as it uses CURL rather than fopen.

There’s more to be done in terms of making the code more elegant, but it’ll come. If you enjoy this script, simply drop me a line to let me know where you’re putting it to good use.

Edit: Upped to 0.55 after cutting even more extraneous code, most of it from the parser module. Now weighs in at only 5kb total.

Download: NWS4Cast 0.55 (5kb)

NWS4Cast v0.5 has been delayed due to a family emergency. Expect it mid-late November.

Now that I’ve found a little time to get back into it, I should have a very simple-to-implement version ready here in the next week or so. I know I’ve said this before, but…

A few changes:
– Separation of style from content
– Considerable cleanup of styles/markup
– Separation of configuration variables from the parsing engine

Please note you must have PHP and CURL installed in order for this script to work. Older versions support the classic way of obtaining the XML file, but from 0.40+, CURL is the name of the game.

Please send any additional feature requests through the contact form.

I’ve updated NWS4Cast to version 0.41 over the weekend. It’s primarily a maintenance release to correct issues with “Visibility” not showing due to a change in the XML data feed.

If you’re not familiar with NWS4Cast (formerly ‘NOAA/NWS XML->PHP Weather Script’, of all things), it’s a PHP script I’ve created to display the current conditions from the National Weather Service on a website, as you can see running over to the right above the credits. The script pulls in the XML feed for the local area, parses it out (CURL required), and displays it in an aesthetically-pleasing format. If you’re so inclined, it’s entirely skinnable, as you’ll see inside the weather.php file.

The next version (0.5) will include the new features seen in the example to the right. It should be out in a week or two after some template tweaks and code cleanup.

Download: NWS4Cast_0.41.zip [50kb, ZIP]

I’m a sucker for the weather. Ever since I was a child, I’ve had a deep fascination with it. When The Weather Channel came about back in the 80s, I was glued to it for as long as my parents would allow (which, as an aside, also helped quite a bit when I was learning geography back in the day) and still it doesn’t take much to recall the old familiar jingles. So, it goes without saying that this guy’s site is weatherporn to me. Oh-so-beautiful weatherporn, indeed.

Since purchasing a decent weather station for my father-in-law on Father’s Day a few weeks ago, I’ve taken an renewed interest in obtaining a true-blue weather station—preferably a very scaled-down setup compared to the above guy, but full-featured enough for (at least) PC data transfers. XML feeds, data manipulation, and simply messing around for the sake of gadgetry… I guarantee it’ll be like Christmas whenever I finally find one within a sane price range (less than $200, preferably) that can spit out the raw data I need to get started.

Until then, I made a solid purchase of a lesser model—the Casio DQR-300 ($29.95 via eBay, MSRP $120.00) seen to the upper-left—though lacking many of the features of a Davis Vantage Pro, or even the mid- to upper-range models you’d see from La Crosse or Oregon Scientific. In short, it’s a beginner unit: atomic time, barometric pressure, 12/20-hour forecasting, indoor/outdoor temperature, and indoor/outdoor humidity measurement are the included features, sans any PC-link. This will suffice until I can drop the dough to get something more comprehensive.

Eventually, in reference to my NWS4Cast app, I’d like to combine the weather data (either NOAA, or that of a weather station in the future) with traffic feeds from Georgia Navigator into a customized version, which should paint a more accurate picture of the current state of affairs around our apartment. Right now I’m relying on NOAA’s XML feeds for my little NWS4Cast app, but given the propensity for KPDK to have differing conditions than my apartment, I’d certainly prefer using my own weather data.

Edit: I managed to find an even better deal on a more comprehensive model last night: a brand-new Discovery Channel Weathertech STX7000 (above, right) which features much more than the Casio, for 58% off the $199.95 retail price. Still no PC-link and it’s pretty much just a rebadged and price-hiked La Crosse, but it’s a great mid-range station to start out with and an ideal display to show everything at a glance. That said, I’ll probably throw the Casio up on eBay as soon as it gets here.

Looking through my referrer logs today, I tracked back through to see where people were coming from. Turns out, there’s another talented individual working on much the same project as I, using the NOAA/NWS feeds, only using C#.

If interested, check out Bernzilla.com.

Also linked off his site is a handy Perl version.

The only major difference between the Perl, C#, and my PHP version is that they are using the WSDL SOAP web service as opposed to directly manipulating the XML feed, which I eventually plan to transition away from [and into SOAP]. I’m a bit rusty in PHP as it’s been a while, so pardon my naivete for now.

I’ll get back to working on the PHP version after the holidays; perhaps even after I finish the redesign. These features are planned, but are subject to recommendations from users, or my very whim:

Planned for v0.4:
– tighten up code quite a bit [it’s a bit messy at the moment]
– add popup or dockable legend for color variance [humidity, temperature, etc.]
– add color variance to $weather [color value: $wea_col]
– organize, organize, organize
– incorporate on/off dockable information (sunrise/sunset, more)
– incorporate icons
– fix newfound inconsistency in handling variable winds. d’oh.

Happy Holidays to you and yours in the meantime.

I developed a small weather script in PHP tonight to take advantage of the new NOAA/NWS XML Feeds made available last month or so. I’ve even taken care of 95% of the footwork for you; as long as you know basic PHP [includes and variables, mainly] and read the extensive documentation in the source files, you can easily have this set up on your own site in five minutes flat using the provided “badge” template.

You can see it in action [using said template] in the upper right-hand corner, and unlike most of the weather scripts out there it’s also highly flexible. If you use it, please drop a comment here letting me know.

Download v0.3 Here – README File

Update: I’ve updated to v0.2 v0.3, which includes some additional streamlining, fixes, and adds color variance based on current weather conditions [temp, humidity, etc.].