Love Windy? Hack Windy. Contributors Wanted

markcupitt

Hi People, I was actually developing a weather system like Windy a few years ago, but it became too much for one individual. Was using my own OSM Database with a Geoserver Front End and getting Feeds from Noah and a few other places. Windy was exactly what I wanted to see ,, so well done ..

I am also a Pilot and Mariner .. and can see the potential for overlaying aviation and nautical charts.

The main issue is data, there is the OpenAIS project OpenSeaMap projects, but both datasets are probably not yet mature enough to be useful in any real form .. where Pilots or Ship Captains would seek to use or trust them

I have rendered this type of data before using Geoserver which can pre-render and cache tiles very nicely and deliver them from a WMS environment ..

There would not actually be much software involved, just some scripts to pull the data and the styling to display the data on the map, then the WMS layer could just be added to your Leaflet Client.

The challenge would be to keep the data current, the aviation databases cycle, generally, every 30 days. so you need to rebuild your tiles to match. A lot of services use vector data in their clients because of this .. re-tiling the earth requires significant server resources and time ..

I am fully committed on projects for the next few months, should I become free for a period of time later this year, I might take a look at this .. if no one else has already.

Considerations for this to be successful would be a server for a Geoserver Instance, PostGRES and PostGIS db and negotiate the licenses for use of the data as needed. Open Seamap is stored in Open Street Map, or it was a while ago, so it is available I think, but OpenAIP has a commercial licensing requirement

Pretty much every other database out there relating to marine maps is commercial. You may need to negotiate a license for any public use .. Open Source Navigation packages get around this limitation by allowing users to scan printed maps and geofererence the raster images for use in the packages

Regards

Mark Cupitt

ivo

@markcupitt It would be great if you would love to try. jest let us know if are about to begin.

idefix37

@ivo
Hi I’m not a programmer.
Concerning Marine Charts you should contact Open CPN.
https://opencpn.org/OpenCPN/info/chartsource.html
There is, may be, a possibility for a cooperation with them.

fuck

Do u need donations. put a donate tab on sit i use windy every day i will donate i think others will also

donfanning

The FAA has all their printed aeronautical maps online at: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/Digital_Products/

Doing a quick perusal of the offerings, it seemingly can be done but would require a WMS server to store the data. That said, as an example, I found http://wms.chartbundle.com/charts/tms.html does have a WMS online and seemingly could be introduced as another overlay.

And NOAA has Maritime maps online at their WMS: http://tileservice.charts.noaa.gov/tileset.html#50000_1-locator
https://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/charts/noaa-enc.html is another offering.

I think the biggest problem - especially globally is actually to hunt/find and either host or reference a related GIS server for those countries/governmental authorities. Not impossible, however. A community cache of these GIS servers would also be beneficial when the GIS servers are down for maintenance or just simply decommissioned without notice or arrangement.

earthzen

Regarding free world maps try here:
map.openseamap.org
www.openstreetmap.org

The problem with depths (seems that openseamap organization has having the same problem) is that they aren't public. Openseamap had a project going where they would ask sailors to have depth sounders with GPS on board yachts to collect data.

earthzen

Since I'm a sailor (and an embedded systems programmer) I have been using windy for several years now.
I also use passageweather.
Passageweather has a great feature that allows to download weather charts (wind, waves, etc) to the laptop in zip format.
This allows while sailing away fro the internet to consult the weather forecast obtained on shore.
Is this feature available on windy? Will it ever be? thanks

Oscar

Hi, I'm a Developer and i like Windy, I want to help you, how can I contact you for understanding the particular topic?can you contact me on my email?
Thanks a lot.

vaseker

@ivo did you see https://github.com/floatdrop/node-cctz? It can be nice replacement for tzwhere.

ankitsxn

Hi,

regarding the timezone, you may roughly calculate it using coordinates longitude
offset = direction * longitude * 24 / 360

where the direction is 1 in case of E and -1 in case of W.

Trust I understand the question.

caub

I didn't know https://github.com/floatdrop/node-cctz, looks good, I used https://github.com/darkskyapp/tz-lookup for one of my small project https://gitlab.com/caub/tzmap

jaffadog

Hi @ivo, regarding donations, I would recommend leveraging existing facilities and frameworks such as:

https://www.patreon.com
https://www.paypal.com
https://stripe.com

Players such as these already handle all of the security and compliance aspects of handling credit/payment cards. I think all of them handle a wide collection of countries and languages.

I think the implementation with windy.com would be windy-specific rather than some new open source project. But perhaps I'm not looking at it the same way you are.

I'm willing to help any way I can. I've used stripe in my own project - so I have some first-hand knowledge there; and have some prior experience with paypal and patreon - although as as standalone services.

Cheers,
Jeremy

ivo

@jaffadog Except for Paypal we can not use them. Stipe is not supported in 3/4 in the world and patreon requires strict registration on their website. But thx anyway

ivo

@jaffadog Basically what we need is use our Windy registered user and ask either for one time, or monthly donation.

MtoPara

hi Ivo

I am founder of a niche-market weather website that I guess you already know. There is some competitive overlaps on our respective "weather" activity.
But we share the vision of open-source and better information for every pilots and sport enthusiasts. I think that having a good sports database for everyone is more important that competition between two companies.

We were already working with ParaglidingEarth founder to refactor the paragliding spots database.
We will use OpenStreetMap as the database backend (because why do we need another new database ?)
So all paragliding spots will be imported into OSM and ParaglidingEarth will serve as a simplified OSM editor and it will also store some metadata such as spots pictures.

I think we have here a very good opportunity to initiate a "spots" movement into OSM. If we merge ParaglidingEarth and your kite spots into OSM, that will encourage people add more spots and more activities - not only PG and Kite.

And, is there any database more legit that OSM for storing geographical POI ? ;)

Want to join us in that project?

(This is a real collaboration proposition. We are not seeking to profit from Windy's visibility)

n_k_samal

@ivo I have some experience in C++, PHP, HTML5 and SQL. Just wanted to know how can I contribute.

ivo

@mtopara Hi. Send me email via PM I will send you kitespots database. Would be nice If you could make also kitespots database editor. The guy behind former SPLOC database did not want to share so there is really need to have Open Source kiting spots database.

Which website do you work on?

julienrf1023

@ivo What does “strict registration” mean?

julienrf1023

@ivo Also, would https://liberapay.com/ work for you?

MtoPara

@ivo i sent you a chat message