Meeting Notes Sept 14, 2021

[Alexander Maidak]

9/14/2021 - QCLUG Meeting Notes

Attendees

Christian

Dan

Devon

Alex

Small but mighty we started: Bring your own topic!

Devon shared his CRT overlay weather display station.

Devon has a “The Weather Star JR” which outputs a character overlay over a composite video display.  Think airport information terminal from the 1990s

Christian indicates that these were in use within the last 5 years at a IL rest stop.

This Weather Star Jr would be sent to say a TV station or Close Circuit TV station and would receive weather information from a weather satellite via BNC which they could overlay into their broadcast or Closed Circuit TV system. 

In 2014 the Analog satellite system was shut down and this system was rendered pretty much useless.

Example forecast broadcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFsDYLY70lQ

Devon has removed the decryption chip and replaced it with an Arduino which he can use to emulate the  input character streams.

He can program the Arduino via node.js  via to get the weather station to display whatever he wants over composite video.

Devon indicates peak weather channel viewing is from 2005, things started going downhill after that.  

Devon indicates a feed like this would be used to crawl the school closures back in the day.

Programming this thing with the Adruino is requires a lot of reverse engineering and trial and error.

 Devon shared overlaying the current weather over top of a weather channel video from ~2005.  Devon knows the name of the Meteorologist in the video.  

Apparently there's a pretty engaged longtail community around these weather stations.

Devon walked through programming the overlay to include a zombie warning.  Followed by a lot of playing with the temperature.

A lot of this is inspired by: https://github.com/healysquared/wsr-frame-control

Devon has read: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7801304B1 to learn how to re-implement the frame controller in awk and javascript.

The original system was the weather star 3000.

Devon wrote metr-decoder after the Derecho last year.

Similar exciting weather display related video: https://www.youtube.com/user/THEtechknight?

Devon’s laptop runs the bspwm window manager https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm.

:mindblown: this is one of more unique hobbies I’ve ever seen.