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Announcing the Weather

I find it pleasing to have my monitoring nodes announce the time on the hour, but I think it’s even cooler that they can also announce the current weather conditions, both on the hour and on demand when I send a *81 (which you can easily configure as a favorite in Supermon). If you would like to do this on a ClearNode, please see my warning at the bottom of the article.

Hourly Announcement

For the hourly announcement, you simply edit the Cron job of your node by SSHing in, going to the shell, and entering the command:

crontab -e

Then simply edit this line by adding your zip code (replace [YOURZIPCODE] with 70448 for example) as described below. If you change your mind later and want to turn off the entire announcement, you can comment out the whole line by placing a “#” in front of it.

00 0-23 * * * (source /usr/local/etc/allstar.env ; /usr/bin/nice -19 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/sbin/saytime.pl [YOURZIPCODE] $NODE1 > /dev/null)

On Demand Announcement

To modify the default *81 command to include weather, it’s another simple change to one line in rpt.conf. From the shell, open rpt.conf:

nano /etc/asterisk/rpt.conf

And scroll down until you find the section that defines these DTMF commands and add your zip code as described below:

; Add local ZIP before node for weather also
81=cmd,/usr/local/sbin/saytime.pl [YOURZIPCODE] [YOURNODENUMBER]

You can also add a simple favorite to Supermon to issue this command whenever you would like from your Favorites menu. You can use the built in Supermon configuration editor to edit your favorites.ini file an add an entry like:

;
label[] = "Announce Time"
cmd[] = "rpt fun %node% *81"
;

Now you can enjoy time and weather on the hour or whenever you like! Maybe traffic on the 5’s is next!

A Note about ClearNodes

This article was written for a typical Hamvoip node, some products like the ClearNode have an interface to include the zip code in the management app which I recommend you stick with. As with any other customization like this, you run the risk of losing it to a future software update or interfering with the way the management app configures the device.