Retro Environment Canada Weather Channel
This project is intended to be a loose recreation of the Environment Canada Weather Channel that was commonly found in Winnipeg in the 80s-90s. This is modeled after the 1995 version. I've tried to be as accurate as possible however there are still some tweaks that could be made to make them more true to life.
All data for the weather channel is sourced from Environment Canada.
Once up and running the weather channel will be accessible from your browser.
Current Features
- Current conditions
- Forecast
- Windchill
- Almanac Data (Sunset/Rise, High/Low Temp Records)
- Latest Hourly Observation for various cities
- Weather Warnings
- Custom playlist
- Custom crawler messages for adverts/general info
Missing Features
- Alerts
- Snowfall/Precipitation Amounts
- High/Low for the day
- Last Year temps on almanac
Planned Features
- Customizable screen rotation
Requirements
To run this project you will need an internet connection and (at least) Node v14.6.1.
NPM will be installed along with Node however I recommend using Yarn for this project.
Before continuing along with this guide make sure you run the following to install the project dependencies.
yarn install
Server Configuration
Before you can start the server you will need to run the setup file to select which Canadian location to pull your weather info from. You will be presented with a list of every location available, or you can use the --search <town/city> option to narrow down the results.
node setup.js [--search town/city]
Now that the server is configured you can run the backend component and the frontend will connect to this to retrieve relevant info.
node backend.js
If sucessful you should see the following in your command prompt:
Loading retro-envcan with primary location of <location> - <province>
Listening on 8600...
Navigate to http://localhost:8600/ in your browser
Adding music to your channel
retro-env-canada-weather-chan supports adding a playlist of your choosing to be played whilst displaying the channel in the browser.
Playlist creation is done simply by placing .mp3 files into a music folder in this root directory.
When you start the backend you will then see it check and generate a playlist for you based off of the files found in that directory.
Generating playlist from `music` folder...
Generated a playlist of 62 files...
Adding crawler messages to your channel
retro-env-canada-weather-chan supports adding custom crawler messages along the top bar for adverts and general info.
This is done by creating a crawl.txt file in the cfg directory. These messages are loaded when the application starts and the data is sent to the channel when it is first loaded.
The crawl.txt supports an unlimited number of messages and all you have to do is add in one message per line
a small crawler message
a second small crawler message
When you start the backend you will then see it check and generate your crawler messages for you.
Generating crawler from ./cfg/crawl.txt...
Generated a crawler list of 2 messages
Accessing the channel
End-users
If you don't intend on doing any development for the project you can just navigate to the channel in your browser as instructed by your terminal window.
The output will fill your browser however the actual screen area will be limited to 640x480.
Developers
Whilst doing any development for the project you can build (and serve) the frontend using the below command.
yarn serve
This will give you access to a hot-reloadable version of the weather channel in your browser.
