(FREE Indigo plugin)

The NOAA Weather Plus plugin extends the functionality of Indigo (versions 5.0 and higher) by allowing you to create an Indigo device that contains weather information for your geographic location. Current weather conditions and a 7-day forecast for your location are gathered from the US National Weather Service (a department of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

Indigo includes a built-in NOAA Weather plugin. However, NOAA Weather Plus goes beyond the functionality of the included NOAA Weather plugin by adding the following features.

• Use your exact geographic latitude and longitude to gather weather information rather than needing to look up your local NOAA weather observation station name.
• 7-day forecasts for morning and evening weather conditions.
• Forecasts include probability of precipitation.
• Forecasts include the weather condition icon state for use in Indigo control pages.
• Forecasts include NOAA's plain-English worded weather predictions for each morning and evenin period.
• 7-day high and low temperature predictions.
• Weather advisories, including start and end dates, are shown in separate device states.
• Current wind chill factor temperature is provided based on observed wind speed in your location (if provided by NOAA).
• Current water temperature if the NOAA weather stations at sea provides that information.
• NOAA Weather Plus device states are backward compatible* with Indigo's included NOAA Weather plugin states, so there's no need to delete existing NOAA Weather devices. Just re-configure them to use the NOAA Weather Plus plugin.
• Improved current condition data reliability. If a current condition is unavailable from the primary data source, NOAA Weather Plus attempts to use data from a secondary data source (the source used by the include NOAA Weather plugin).
• NOAA Weather Plus devices refresh weather data from NOAA servers every 15 minutes rather than every 30 minutes like the included NOAA Weather plugin.

Installation

Use the download link above to download the latest version of the plugin. Once downloaded, it should automatically unzip, but if it doesn't double-click the zip file to decompress it. If you downloaded the plugin from a computer other than your Indigo server computer, move the plugin file to any location on your Indigo server. Once decompressed and moved to the computer with the Indigo server running, double-click the "NOAA Weather Plus.indigoPlugin" icon. You should be prompted to install and configure the plugin. The only global plugin configuration is the option to turn debug logging on or off (it's off by default). Simply click "Save" to continue. The plugin is installed.

Using It

Use NOAA Weather Plus by creating a new Indigo device within the Indigo client. Within the Devices section of the Indigo client, click the "New..." button. Name the device (perhaps "My Weather"). Select "Plugin" as the device Type. Select "NOAA Weather Plus" as the Plugin. Select "Weather Locale" as the Model. A configuration dialog will appear. Enter the geographic latitude and longitude coordinates of the location for which you'd like to monitor weather conditions and forecast information. (Of course, weather data is limited to that gathered by the US National Weather Service, so coordinates outside the US will either result in an error or very limited data). If you don't know your geographic coordinates, you can click on the "Find My Location Info" button (only works on the Indigo server machine) to open your web browser to Indigo Domotocs' suggested location lookup site links.

* NOAA Weather Plus does not contain the following states that do exist in the included NOAA Weather plugin: dewPointString, heatIndexString, temperatureString, windString. Additionally, all measurements are rounded to a realistic (lower) level of precission to more accurately reflect measured values coming from NOAA (e.g. temperatures do not contain decimal values).