Dear Grand and WeatherCat tinkerers and drought watchers, . . . .
Let me explain why: We Californians are in the fourth year of a serious drought.
You definitely ain't alone brother . . . .
http://athena.trixology.com/index.php?topic=1392.0My request is to add a general software mechanism for dynamically importing any external data to WeatherCat. By external data I mean data not from the weather station itself but from a separate software program.
Well, if you could use AppleScript as the "glue," WeatherCat already has a mechanism for importing data: Synthetic Channels. I have one synthetic channel that computes the different between the actual monthly rainfall and the normal average monthly rainfall and displays that on a graph. Here is the current graph and custom gauge:
Amazingly, we are well above average for June rainfall because of that 0.25 of rain we got on June 10 from the remnants of hurricane Blanca.
I also have a graph of WeatherCat memory use:
I have my
WC Status Growler AppleScript get the memory use from the UNIX utility
top and then it puts the value in a file that my AppleScript synthetic channel picks up to graph.
AppleScript is hardly an elegant language, but it should be able to do what you want. The easiest way to bring your data into WeatherCat is indeed to have some small "breadcrumb" files containing the numbers you want have brought into WeatherCat and then have small AppleScript synthetic channels that open up the file, read the value and return that as the value.
You can read more about synthetic channels on page 56 of the current WeatherCat manual, and I'll gladly send you my AppleScript source if you want it.
If you want better control for inputting data, you could write a WeatherCat plugin. I've wanted to convert most of my AppleScripts into WeatherCat plugins, but I don't have the Mac GUI programming experience and that's quite a curve for me to climb. You might not find it much of a challenge though. You can download the WeatherCat SDK at the bottom of this page:
http://trixology.com/weathercat/or is the direct link to download it:
http://data.trixology.com/downloads/WeatherCatSDK120.zipThis definitely should be possible for someone with your skills. The question isn't if, but which path you choose.
Cheers, Edouard