Love Windy? Hack Windy. Contributors Wanted
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Depreciated: We have failed to find contributors, so we have cancelled some of our projects
If you like Windy and if you are a programmer, here is how you can help us. If you would like to develop one of these components, and release it as an Open Source on GitHub, we would have more time to concentrate on core development of Windy.
Right now we are working on:
- Map city labels that are faster and require much less bandwidth
- Internal system for better testing of new releases
- Weather radar in Europe and other countries
- iOS widget
- Warning system for extreme weather situations
- ...
Here is a list of utils/projects/codes that would benefit not only Windy, but the whole community:
Geospatial timezone library for node.js
The problem: For each point forecast request (imagine hundreds rqst per a second) we need to determine users timezone. We currentlly use https://github.com/mattbornski/tzwhere library, that we have improved to this condition https://github.com/ilblog/tzwhere The lib is fast but it uses obsolete polygons that do not contain coastal waters. Therefore we need a new library or we need to improve the old one. Also there are oceanic time zones and it it would be nice for the lib to include them too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone
Possible solution: There is new library https://github.com/evansiroky/node-geo-tz but, which is unusable since it a) uses blocking ops, 2) opens geoshape on the request 3) trashes opened data afterwards. As an inspiration good, but what about having all the shapes in-memory to make it blazing fast. And to simplify the shapes to reduce memory. Writing this library for high performance can be the challenging task, you are maybe waiting to. Make it fast, make it stable, make it OpenSource and each forecast request on Windy, will use your library.Aeronautical Chart on Windy
The problem: Windy is used by thousands of pilots and drone operators every day and we would love to offer them schematic map of airspaces. As you are aware we use http://leafletjs.com/ (version 0.77), and if this map would be delivered as map tiles, that would cost us minimum changes in client side part (that we keep so small and blazing fast).
Possible solution: There is https://www.openaip.net/ project with raw data and maybe even other data source. And there is https://github.com/mapnik that could render mercator tiles. Data are here, the tools are here. Just remember that Windy renders color layer behind map tiles, so we use transparent PNG's as map tiles. And not to mention that 70% of all devices have retina screen. If this project would be in form of some utils for Mapnik would be great. Make it good, make it OpenSource and flying community would love you.Sea depths and Marine Chart on Windy
The problem: Fishermen, surfers, boaters and sailors would love to have sea depths map on Windy, maybe including marine navigational marks. Is this available as na open data? If yes let's make it as map for Windy.
The solution: Everything what applies for "aeronautical chart" applies also here.System for user's donations
The problem: We would like to continue our future as non-commercial entity, because I think, this is a good thing. And our users actually want to donate, which is good thing. but all the donation based solutions we have investigated have two things in common: 1) They require registration on their own donation site or/and 2) They are blocked in some parts of a World and/or 3) They speak only english. But what about us. We have our own registered users, and surprisingly from all over the world, and we support 44 languages. What about us?
The solution: Develop system for donation that would be as an Open Source and any website would be able to use it, hack it, integrate it, improve it. How these donations work? Donors can choose if they want to contribute one time payment or on a monthly basis. Amounts of such payments is chosen by donor himself and in case of recurrent payment, he can cancel the payment anytime he wants. User are authenticated via oauth, since anyone who will use the system, already has some registered group. All this can be localized to many languages, people can pay via PayPal or credit card and they can contribute from most of the part of the World.
Technologies: Well the choice is yours, since you are the developer. But we love node.js, mongo, mySQL or any database that is stable and widely used. And as of front end, well nothing beats pure vanilla JS but I guess that everything else is good. We know vue, riot js, react we love the concept of Svelte.technlogy.How to proceed
Just drop a line here in this thread and start your project.
Our team (Tomas Z., the most important person, is missing)Our commitment to open source
I am committed to Open Source. My 3D mapping start-up Melown that I have founded and invested together with Ondrej Prochazka few years before Windy was born, released more than 50.000 lines of code as Open Source github.com/melown. You can think of Melown as a Leaflet 3D together with backend components.
However, Windy is evolving so fast and organically that separating our custom made code (used for running Windy.com website) from components that can be reused as open source components would cost us enormous amount of work and slow our development process.
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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
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@markcupitt It would be great if you would love to try. jest let us know if are about to begin.
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@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.
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Do u need donations. put a donate tab on sit i use windy every day i will donate i think others will also
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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.
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Regarding free world maps try here:
map.openseamap.org
www.openstreetmap.orgThe 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.
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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
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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.
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@ivo did you see https://github.com/floatdrop/node-cctz? It can be nice replacement for tzwhere.
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Hi,
regarding the timezone, you may roughly calculate it using coordinates longitude
offset = direction * longitude * 24 / 360where the direction is 1 in case of E and -1 in case of W.
Trust I understand the question.
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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
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Hi @ivo, regarding donations, I would recommend leveraging existing facilities and frameworks such as:
https://www.patreon.com
https://www.paypal.com
https://stripe.comPlayers 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
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@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
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@jaffadog Basically what we need is use our Windy registered user and ask either for one time, or monthly donation.
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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)
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@ivo I have some experience in C++, PHP, HTML5 and SQL. Just wanted to know how can I contribute.
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@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?
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@ivo What does “strict registration” mean?
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@ivo Also, would https://liberapay.com/ work for you?
