All,
Probably tripped over you know what, but it's funny how or what kinds of tangents take place via the internet.
Background, I've been using VWS for years and really like it so changing ships wasn't an option. I also have a Davis VP2 and the below is tailored to those 2 environments.
Anyway, long story short, I have VWS working with WDL and supporting rapid updates. I basically hacked together a solution with perl to do some file translations from the wflash file to the clientraw.txt files.
While I don't have everything working, I do have the basics. It's a very convoluted solution at the moment and basically flows like this.
a) VWS output a processed HTX file that looks exactly like a clientraw file (with a bunch of static non-changing elements hard coded into it - this file is only updated on 5 min intervals - this works for most of the slow changing elements that WDL displays, etc
b) VWS also puts out a wflash and wflash2 file - this is output right now on 30 sec intervals, but can be quickened
c) a perl script runs on my linux server and takes the clientraw file that is created by the HTX process in VWS, and the wflash file and updates the dynamic elements and writes it back to the clientraw file. This is currently done on a 15 second interval, but also can be quickened
WDL then happily picks up the clientraw file and provides dynamic content via the flash tool.
Random NOTES:
- with the above, you can bypass the limitation that VWS has around outputing the HTX files fast enough, the wflash files provide the rapid updates.
- I have none of the historical data working in WDL as of yet, nor do I update any of the non-Davis specific content in the clientraw - these are just hard coded.
- Times and Dates and conversions are working
- I need to add support for wflash2 and some of it's dynamic content
- I know how to support clientrawextra, but haven't done it yet, so right now, I don't pick up sun/moon stuff or forecast text but am working on it.
Credit where credit is due... I actually started this based upon finding some early work that someone else did in another part of the world. Problem with it. - it was based upon a very early clientraw format, and very early VWS html tags. I've correct all of those.
- I also found an invaluable reference of VWS htmls tags to wflash and wflash2 file formats. To this I've now added a mapping for clientraw and will most likely add the same for clientrawextra
Anyway, more as I develop this further....
To see it in all of it's terrible glory, you can check it out by doing to
http://www.maxwinds.com/Broadcast.htm - I haven't licensed the WDL yet, so you'll get the evaluation banner and bear in mind not all of the slow changing content changes just yet. But it will over time as I continue the work above.
Have fun, and let me know what you think. I couldnt find this work anywhere else, so I started sorta from scratch (albiet based upon some prior work that wasn't completed).
Alan Adamson
Atlanta, GA
