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[Knightrider]

Not a current device here at the Knightmare, but the thought did come to me.


It's severe weather season again in my part of the planet, and was thinking of getting a cheap weather radio.  Was also thinking of connecting it's audio output to a powerflash and having it trip the lights when a weather alert comes in at night to turn on a light or two.  This is very similar to my storm siren setup except that the storm siren doesn't trigger the powerflash directly from the audio.

Now here's the hitch.  Anyone who wants to attempt this mod themselves will gladly be given help and advice by both myself, and BVD.  There are very many weather radios on the market, and I'm sure they are all slightly different.

Let me state again that this, or any other mod I've posted on the forum should not be counted on to save your life, but just to make life easier in the event of a severe weather alert.

The ball is now in your court.  If you do attempt this mod, I'm asking that you post pictures and some instructions in this thread so that others may follow.  Also, please tell us how hard or easy it was to do this.

I'm going to pick up one of these units myself and post.  Hopefully, I'll be able to squeeze some bandwidth out of my slow dial-up connection and get some pics.  Happy modding!!!!

As always,  you can find me at KDR's Chat in the evenings.

[dave w]

O-o-o-o-h-h good idea.

Since Power Flash will trigger on audio, it may be as simple as soldering a couple of wires on the radio speaker and connecting them to the power flash through a switch (so you could disable, if you wanted to listen to the regular update). I have a Midland NOAA that has an "Ext Alert" jack. Guess I need to find the instructions to see what is there during an alert.

Knight, this will be fun!

[Knightrider]

O-o-o-o-h-h good idea.

Since Power Flash will trigger on audio, it may be as simple as soldering a couple of wires on the radio speaker and connecting them to the power flash through a switch (so you could disable, if you wanted to listen to the regular update). I have a Midland NOAA that has an "Ext Alert" jack. Guess I need to find the instructions to see what is there during an alert.

Knight, this will be fun!

Dave,
Glad you approve. The wires to the speaker was what I was thinking.  I never thought of the switch, but that's a
Great Idea!
Thanks!

[JMac]

I'm interested in this also.  Some time back I tried to use the Power Flash on the Midland radio and I could never get it to work.  The external alert jack never seemed to activate the power flash with a NOAA warning for some reason.  The Midland instructions are very vague concerning its use.

[BVD]

Knightrider,
Here is a link to the NOAA Radio NWR & SAME codes folks need to program into their weather radio assure folks get the proper alerts for their States and Counties in the United States.

http://www.weather.gov/nwr/indexnw.htm

I thought this might help especially the one who posted they could not get anything on their Weather Radio.

Till Later,
Bob

[steven r]

Some, such as the inexpensive Midland I have, have an output jack for triggering an external alert such as a powerflash module.

Once you can trigger a powerflash, the sky's the limit as to what you can do.

[HA Dave]

......... It's severe weather season again in my part of the planet, and was thinking of getting a cheap weather radio.

The wife and I were having dinner tonight and could only sorta barely hear the weather alert... over the sound of the TV I had left on. We keep it in a spare bedroom so it's out-of-sight... but it's still loud enough to get our attention most of the time.. or at least while we are sleeping. This already sounds like a great possible project.

Some, such as the inexpensive Midland I have, have an output jack for triggering an external alert such as a powerflash module. Once you can trigger a powerflash, the sky's the limit as to what you can do.

When I went in to the spare bedroom to hear what the weather alert radio was.. alerting us about. I noticed ours is also a Midland... and also has the ext alert jack-looking-hole there. And... I do have a spare PowerFlash.

Huummm... maybe I could run that radio through my BVC speakers... or also (use BVC) to mute the TV... so much can be done.

I went to http://www.midlandradio.com/   to poke around and checkout manuals and strobe lights and such.

[Kramer Chins]

......... It's severe weather season again in my part of the planet, and was thinking of getting a cheap weather radio.

The wife and I were having dinner tonight and could only sorta barely hear the weather alert... over the sound of the TV I had left on. We keep it in a spare bedroom so it's out-of-sight... but it's still loud enough to get our attention most of the time.. or at least while we are sleeping. This already sounds like a great possiable project.

Some, such as the inexpensive Midland I have, have an output jack for triggering an external alert such as a powerflash module. Once you can trigger a powerflash, the sky's the limit as to what you can do.

When I went in to the spare bedroom to hear what the weather alert radio was.. alerting us about. I noticed ours is also a Midland... and also has the ext alert jack-looking-hole there. And... I do have a spare PowerFlash.

Huummm... maybe I could run that radio through my BVC speakers... or also (use BVC) to mute the TV... so much can be done.

What Midland Model is it ..........

[HA Dave]

What Midland Model is it ..........

Mine is an old 74-109.

[WildBill47]

You might go about this another way, NOAA has an XML RSS feeds as well as ASCII text feeds, would not seem hard to write a small application to monitor one of these feed type and parse it for data relevent to you. You can get an ASCII text feed radio pretty cheap my guess is. Feed that to a serial port on you AHP PC and then you could tigger BVC, power horns, lights, you could even fax our your Will depending on the content of the message.

Last I saw their text formats they were highly structured with headers, date/time stamps in GMT, various codes for the nature of the alert, etc, these text for humans was almost an after throught.

Something to think about.

[Knightrider]

You might go about this another way, NOAA has an XML RSS feeds as well as ASCII text feeds, would not seem hard to write a small application to monitor one of these feed type and parse it for data relevent to you.

For that matter, there are some weather related SDK's out there (ahem, weatherbug, ahem) that could do that as well.
Most of us use cable modems these days (I wish), and that tend to go out from time to time.

That being said, my power tends to go out in a storm too which makes x10 useless anyways.

Let me ask you this: you really want to run the computer in a storm?

[WildBill47]

The one I worked with over 20 years ago now was a UHF radio based unit at a local FM radio station, RF was from s NOAA, would set it beeping for severe warnings, wish I could remember when kind it was but at the time I was just developing an application to take the test and format the text to plug it in to canned alert annoucemments for the "talent"

It would be easy enough to power the radio from a few rechargable D cells, if you did not want to have it risked being plugged in. The application could run off a super low end portable PC to a good APC UPS and you would be all set. I would not rely on phone or internet lines either.

[Tuicemen]

Actually this was a very early add to X10Dispatcher Not sure if it still works with the US web site it was configured to but it is easy to setup for Any web based weather reporting site, from that you could do what I had setup!
I had it call my cell Phone and using AlertDialer I could trigger any X10 event and even power down the PC! 
But you could trigger any thing with X10dispatcher!