inreach-ground-control

An app for reading and responding to messages from an inReach satellite messenger.

Heavily inspired by wx2inreach, which, while excellent, does not include raw meterological information -- notably, wind speed and atmospheric pressure -- that can be crucial pieces of information when planning in the field.

Disclaimer

This service was developed almost entirely as a learning exercise. Currently, bare minimum functionality has been implemented to be able to tell me how windy it may be in the mountains in Patagonia.

If you would like to test this in the field, please contact me and I will give you further instructions on how to contact my server. However, there is no warranty or guarantee that the service will work, or will provide an accurate forecast.

Usage

WeatherReport.report_weather() will monitor a specified email inbox, and respond to requests for weather forecasts only for messages that were sent from an inReach device.

Forecasts are generously provided by the Dark Sky API.

Every request for a message must begin with wx <start_time>, where start_time is either now or +n days.

The simplest message that will be answered is, as with wx2inreach, wx now. The service will respond with a "daily" weather report for your current location (inferred by the inReach message) for today and the following two days.

By default, the units will be automatically be inferred from your current country. This may be overwritten by setting the units parameter.

Options

• Options should be separated by commas.
• All whitespace (spaces and new lines) are ignored -- all options may be specified on one line, as long as they are separated by commas.
• Options not listed below are currently ignored -- you may set loc=My House, for instance, to serve as a reminder in your preset messages.
• If either lat and lon are missing, by default the user's location is used.
• See https://darksky.net/dev/docs for details about the units option.

In other words, messages should look like so, with lines 2-5 optional.

wx <time>,
lat=<decimal latitude coordinate>,
lon=<decimal longitude coordinate>,
days=<integer between 1 and 10>,
units=<auto,ca,uk2,us,si>

Example responses

TODO

TODO

• Hourly forecasts
• Repeating forecasts
• Weather summary