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HomeVisionXL Weather Plug-in

The weather plug-in was created by Ron Boston and Bob Gardner. It is intended for use with the control plug-in. It extracts weather data from the Web and makes it available to the control plug-in via Control Variables. Additionally, some weather data can be sent to certain built-in HV weather variables.

Version 2.0 provides access to additional Web weather data, expanding coverage to include thousands of weather stations Worldwide. The user now has a choice of selecting either METAR weather data, which has worldwide coverage, or the original XML-based weather data (for U.S. and possessions),

The plug-in uses XML and METAR weather data from NOAA. XML users can go to the NOAA XML Weather Site for possible station names to use in configuring your weather plug-in, or use the "Get Stations" feature of the plug-in. METAR users can go to the NOAA International Weather Site to select a station, find the station ID (a four character designation), and manually enter this in the plug-in Configure screen. Retrieval of METAR station IDs by the plug-in is a possible future enhancement.

Major changes since the 1.x version:

  • Added support for METAR weather data, providing worldwide coverage.
  • Added choice of 12- or 24-hour time reporting.
  • Added scale choices for wind speed (miles per hour, kilometers per hour, knots, and Beaufort) and for barometric pressure (inches, millibars and millimeters) in addition to the already available temperature scale choices of Celsius and Fahrenheit. Control Variables Wind, Pressure, Temp, Dewpoint, Windchill and HeatIndex as well as HV Weather Variables Current Outside Temperature, Current Wind Speed, Current Barometric Pressure are affected by scale choices. (Currently only applies to METAR.)
  • Added the following new Control Variables: WindKPH, WindKTS, WindBft, WindGustKPH, WindGustKTS, PressureMm. (Currently only applies to METAR.)
  • Added ability to write observation time and date to HV variables.
  • Once fetched, a copy of the (mostly U.S.) weather stations list is now saved locally so the station list is always available. Expansion of this list to include all weather stations worldwide is a potential future addition.

See weather plug-in Help for more details.

HomeVisionXL version 2.0b10 or later required.

Please direct comments, questions, and bug reports to Ron Boston.

Last modified: 15 September 2008, 22:38 CEST