Problems with forecast

[bitjockey]

Reposting, as my post from 20 minutes ago never appeared.

I'm using 6.0.7 of mcsTemperature along with a TEMP08.
All is working fine except forecasts -- I see no forecast info on the web page, and there's no forecast data in the database. My .ini file has myACCID="CYQA" as my location (Canada).

Questions:
1. What sites are used in this version for weather data?
2. Do these sites support Canadian locations such as mine?
3. Do I have to fill in the virtual device fields under "<small>Sensor Virtual Devices for Forecast Display and Controls"?

I noticed the web interface has no field corresponding to the older tabbed interface for moving forecast data to virtual devices...is there a way to specify that with the web interface?

thanks for your help!
</small>

[Michael McSharry]

I did some investigation and discovered that the US National Weather Service provides international forecasts, but does not provide for current conditons outside of the USA. The forecast is based upon lat and lon which is setup from Homeseer Location setup. The XML feed that you can use in your browser to investigate is
[/url]http://www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/CYQA.xml[/url] where CYQA is the site ID for a given reporting station. From this browser page they provide site IDs with similar spelling, but I have no idea where these are. If you choose a nearby US city such as Buffalo (KBUF) then you get close, but obviously not very accurate for Toronto. If Toronto starts paying US taxes then the NWS may provide current condtions.

The preferred approach will be to use Weather.Com where you need to register for a free license. There are terms of use for Weather.com which mcsTemperature could not assure so it was removed as a download, but still will process the downloaded xml file if it is available. mcsSprinklers does comply with the Weather.com terms and will download the currrent conditions and forecast from that site.

I also noticed that some sites did not report the feels-like temperature and that was causing the XML parsing within mcsTemperature to abort. I fixed that in the latest posted version.

[bitjockey]

Thanks Michael, I got things working today -- my problems were caused by a combo of things:

- Couldn't get registered properly at weather.com -- the registration form kept prompting me for the same info without any explanation. I thought it might be due to my non-US credentials messing things up...but it was my browser. Don't use Firefox to fill in the registration, works perfectly with IE.

- In parallel to getting mcsTemperature working, I tried weatherXML. Finally got that to work, then figured out I had to change some mcsTemperature settings in the WeatherXML table (select "GetFromWeatherXMLFile")

I still have a problem with radar URL. The url I used is
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/wea...link_obs_radar

but that results in the following lines in the log:
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td colspan="1" class="LOGDateTime1" align="left" nowrap="nowrap">
</td><td colspan="3" class="LOGType1" align="left"> mcsTemperature </td><td colspan="8" class="LOGEntry1" align="left">ReadImageInfo file C:\Program Files\HomeSeer 2\HTML\Images\Weather\caon0525?ref=qlink_obs_radar: on line 70 Bad file name or number</td></tr> <tr> <td colspan="1" class="LOGDateTime0" align="left" nowrap="nowrap">
</td><td colspan="3" class="LOGType0" align="left">
</td><td colspan="8" class="LOGEntry0" align="left">Web Server Error 404, cannot serve file: C:\Program Files\HomeSeer 2\html/Images/Weather/caon0525?ref=qlink_obs_radar</td></tr></tbody></table>

[Michael McSharry]

Your radar link needs to be to an image and not a HTML page or a dynamic control. Your link is to a web page and within that web page is a bing dynamic image. In my case I use a local TV station's radar image.

[bitjockey]

Your radar link needs to be to an image and not a HTML page or a dynamic control. Your link is to a web page and within that web page is a bing dynamic image. In my case I use a local TV station's radar image.

Thanks Michael, got it all figured out now. Best wishes for Christmas and 2010! I'm heading up to my cottage for Christmas, will install more TEMP08 sensors and spend more time tweaking my HS2 setup there -- much easier than accessing everything remotely as I've been doing for some time.