Wireless Weather Forecast

[ljbeng]

Walmart has a wall mounted lcd display that get the current forecast from accuweather.com wirelessly (from FM Radio Stations?) How can I build this into my device? Is there a chip that I can incorporate into my design to receive this same information? Thanks.

[stevech]

Betcha the data is encrypted

[kheston]

The fact that it's from accuweather.com leads me to think the device likely has a BlueTooth or 802.11 connection to a PC in the house that retrieves weather forecasts from a web feed.

Weather.com has free feeds you can use with wireless devices:

http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html

this looks promising too:

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/

[jollyrgr]

Which one is being sold at Walmart? I did not see this at their web site and have not noticed this in their stores. Is this the Bushnell?
http://www.bushnell.com/general/weather ... eral%20Use

If it is not the Bushnell could it be one of these:
http://map.myambient.com/


The information on building your own weather forecasting device can be found here:
http://www.ambientdevices.com/datacasting/

They also sell clocks that tell you the complete Baseball, Football, and Market data. See these clocks:
http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/products.html

I've researched the protoboard information and will give a concise overview of how these clocks receive their data. They do not use FM radio stations, XM satellite, or GPS as some systems do. They use a pager network operating in the 900MHz band. The receivers themselves (according to the manual) can be as cheap as $5.00 to $6.00. Battery life for the receiver is three or so months using a single AAA cell. The size of some of the receivers will fit in a watch. Instead of specifically addressed to a single user (which can also be done with certain implementations of these types of clocks) all devices receive the same "page" which is the weather or similar data.

The specific name of this pager network is the Flex (one way) and reFlex (two way) pager network. Per the implementation sheet there are 40 frequencies in the 900MHz band; 17 of which are nationwide. My description is a simplified version of a 14 page document so it may not be "exact". This is only an OVERVIEW. If you want to read the full 14 page document, go here:

http://www.ambientdevices.com/datacasti ... etwork.pdf

[ljbeng]

It looks just like this one:
http://www.bushnell.com/general/weather ... eral%20Use

I was in a Walmart in Hastings, Nebraska and I only see Omaha as a listed state. It was $89.

I will look at the Ambient engine a little closer. If I make it back to that Walmart, I will look a little closer (or maybe even buy one).

Thanks.