Traffic conditions and Alarm Clock

T

Treetop

Active Member
Came across this awhile ago, and had forgotten about it...(my fiance actually reminded me... I think shes hooked on the HA ideas ;)

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/faculty/tis/PressNewsClock.htm
and..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2269144.stm

Was wondering if something like this already existed, or could be created by scraping a webpage... would be a nice touch to the morning ritual, always giving me (you) time to have that cup of coffee and not be rushed.

Sorry about posting in this forum, but I wasn't sure where to put it, and since there is a chance that this idea could be done as a script... Feel free to move.
 
Every morning Homeseer gives me the weather, the breaking news, the solar forecast, the geomagnetic forecast, the K index, 24 flare max, the tropical outlook and river flow. Close enough? ;)
 
Every morning Homeseer gives me the weather, the breaking news, the solar forecast, the geomagnetic forecast, the K index, 24 flare max, the tropical outlook and river flow
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I'm not even going to ask why you need all that information every morning, hehe! ;) (But I have to, K index and flare max, etc... for Ham stuff??)
 
One of my hobbies is astronomy. K index gives a measure of the likelyhood of Aurora. If the K index is above 8, I'll be notified during the night, so I can get up and look outside. Flare Max, because I find the sun facinating. A flare can preceed an auroral display by 2 or 3 days.
 
Wow Ski!

I know that webpages can be scraped and the information can be relayed to the user in many different formats (ie. voice, email, etc). I guess what I was intially thinking was about a script that would use the data to change the time that events are run (say if traffic on I-74 = heavy, run wake-up events 30 minutes earlier.. lots of possibilties including recommending another (preset?) route if traffic = light on that route).

The main problem with this idea, is finding the data! I can only find data for construction zones (AAA site, etc.) but nothing for updated traffic advisories (I was looking at local news and radio station's sites to no avail). I'm pretty sure that the script could be written if the data was available... but alas :(

Would you mind sharing a couple of your scripts with us? I would love to take a look at them to use as a learning tool. Im especially intrigued by the news alerts :)

Cheers,
Treetop
 
All of my scripts, and a few from others that have posted are available for download from skibumsplace.com :) (free, of course)

There are no instructions included with most of the scripts. If you need any help, just post the question to my forum.
 
The people over at Home Automation (http://www.automatedliving.com) who put out HAL2000 built these features into the software. They run their own servers that HAL connects to and downloads all the updated info. They have traffic reports for local areas (if you live in a populated area) as well as sports, news, stock prices, weather and a few other things. . I have a cable modem so I have HAL connect every 10 minutes to update the info. The traffic reports are pretty good.
 
I don't know I never used MSN traffic. A point with having the info coming from the HAL servers, or from any specific server, is that the wording and reports structure are consistent. That is something you’re going to want if you want to be able to trigger an event to wake you early if the traffic is heavy.
 
theAberdeenKid said:
Hey maybe we could do this ourselves within the community, perhaps with a yearly fee to join for maintenance and upkeep. Lease some space somewhere and have a server that harvests all the info we want in various categories. That way we would only need to connect to one source for the info we wanted.
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At least one site I know of got into trouble for providing harvested data in XML format without permission. That site is no longer around.

Isn't the data from MSN Traffic good enough?
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The MSN traffic data has been the most detailed and up-to-the-minute that I've run across. I don't like the fact that you need to log in, but the data is good.

I've never done anything about it, but the command to draw the maps contains the longitude/latitude data for the reported situations. It should be pretty easy to look through this data and find all of the events along your planned route (especially if it's the same route every day (like going to work)).
 
Ah man, that would be perfect, but they don't have data for Charleston :) even though its a decent size city. The layout/format is consistent and provides exactly the type of data I was looking for. Guess it can't hurt to email them and see if they can add my city...though i doubt it will do any good. At least I know that it is possible!
http://autos.msn.com/everyday/TrafficReport.aspx?metro=000

Also, if you log in to alert settings, you can choose areas outside of the metro.. other counties, towns, etc.
 
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