An understanding of the local weather is very useful to a contextual smart home. It doesn't necessarily have to be from a local weather station. There are many sources of local weather information available online. Real measurements collected via a local weather station can provide more accuracy and timeliness though.
We use a local weather station connected to our and this provides timely and accurate weather data, which can be used to deliver notifications and on leaving home or at other times of the day.
There are main types of rainfall sensor readily available but, we also wanted to add a real-time understanding of whether it was raining or not and we do this using an optical rain sensor. This allows our smart home to make relevant voice announcements and send notifications.
We also plan to use current weather and weather forecasts to intelligently control a ../garden/mower.phpForecasts
Our smart home also retrieves local weather forecasts online from various sources and processes them to understand the key aspects. It will send us useful notifications if inclement weather conditions are forecast, so that we are prepared for them.
The key to realising the full power of weather forecasts occurs when the smart home can analyse and understand them. Our contextual smart home does this to extract the important data, such as:
It also analyses forecast looking for keywords such as 'frost', 'hail', 'rain', 'snow', 'storm', 'windy', etc.
We have also developed a lightning sensor to allow our contextual smart home be be aware of local lightning strikes and their frequency.
There are a lot of weather sites on the Internet but, these are the key ones that we use:
The https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather website provides detailed, local forecasts but the data needs to be extracted from their web pages. They do also provide RSS feeds.
The https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ website provides detailed, local forecasts but the data needs to be extracted from their web pages. They do also provide RSS feeds.
yourweather.co.uk provides an API (registration required) for XML and JSON files with detailed weather data.
