Marvin the weather robot.

Marvin is a programme I wrote in java which crawls the Australian bureau of meterology's site and drills down looking for severe weather warnings for my town. If found, it announces them over a ham radio using freeTTS.

As well, it drills for the weather parameters page for Albury each 30 mins and announces what is on that as well.

Marvin goes looking for my town's weather paramaters he drills and manufactures his own URLs on the fly. He goes looking down those URLs, strips all the HTML and inserts syntax for the TTS. Stores the finished file. Activates timers. Checks for a clear channel, fires up the transmitter and announces:

i) ID (if selected)
ii) Time (if selected)
iii) Verbose warnings (if selected)
iv) Barametric pressure and shift since midnight
v) Air temp and feels like temp if it is rising or falling
vi) Humidity
vii) Wind direction, gusting and speed
viii) Rain since 9am (if any)
ix) Fire danger rating (if selected)

Every 15 mins it faithfully searches for me, it is like my own little weather guardian angel. It makes me think that the six years I spent studying computer science at Charles Sturt uni was all worth while! I'm now doing a nursing degree.

It is a damm sight cheaper than going out and buying your own weather station.