I wrote a program that utilizes the WeatherFlow forecasts api to pull weather forecast data in and then uses that data to post a weather forecast to a Facebook page. I have a cron job running to post the forecast at 5am so I can get the forecast when I’m doing my morning Facebook scroll.
Code and steps to do it on github
why would getting your own data be in question ?
This is super cool. I’m wanting to do something like this for twitter.
Not getting your own data, but sharing it via a 3rd party site.
That’s my next step, port it over to twitter. After that, I’m going to write a Facebook Messenger bot for the page so that people can send a message to the page, “What’s the weather going to be for today” or “What are the current conditions” or “What will be the high temperature tomorrow” and the page will reply to the user with the requested data.
(not a lawyer and I’ve seen no public page of WF’s perceived acceptable use policy, but…)
I still see no issue. Many folks do things like run weewx and feed their own internet websites, tweet their info, and also supply data to the usual Internet web sites like CWOP/PWS/WU/etc. via their own mechanisms.
I just see nothing wrong here. Fair use for noncommercial purposes at a minimum in my opinion.
That said, I personally think ‘my’ data could be used by ‘me’ for commercial purposes as well.
Should be interesting if WF has a different opinion…
The weather forecast isn’t my data, it’s WeatherFlow’s… so I could see where the challenge could be there. If I would be posting my own current conditions, I think you have a solid point though.
With that said, I don’t want to break any data use policies, so if WF says no, I’ll just take it down. There’s nothing in it for me, I’m not making any money off it, programming and weather are two big hobbies of mine, so it was just fun to smash the two together and make something useful for others.
When you do the twitter version I’d love to help you test it/try it out. Also, love the idea of the messaging in two directions…
Billy
It’s not clear whether there are any lines folks can’t cross re: their forecast so it’s probably prudent to hear officially from WF before doing much more than speculating.
I would find it a little hard to believe that WF would have a problem with this one, but they’d have to chime in officially for us to know for certain
The line that I’ve understood is “publicly sharing” data from the WF API.
Sharing data from the UDP broadcasts is OK… As that data is truly “your data”.
Can you share a link to your Facebook page so we can see what this looks like when it’s posted. I’m assuming it’s to a public page? Thanks.
“Silence is Acquiescence” … since @dsj and @WFsupport have not responded… I assume that we can all assume that posting WF data from the API publicly is 100% Ok.
Nice to know… no response form them means that they agree!
Yay!
Hi folks. Sorry for the delay. Just saw this one.
Neat! Well done! I’m sure a lot of folks will find that useful.
Actually, this kind of sharing is encouraged! It’s more or less the equivalent of our “share page”. That said, this does look like it technically violates our terms (see below) because it doesn’t provide any credit or attribution back to WeatherFlow-Tempest (as far as I can tell). But that can be fixed by adding a link to our website or our Facebook page or Instagram or Twitter. Or better yet: add a link to the share page of the station to which the data applies. @mabeatty1978, that might help readers of your feed and we’d sure appreciate it!
Right, if you’re pulling data directly from the local hardware (via UDP or BLE or however else you do it), you’re welcome to do whatever you want with that. However, here we’re talking about data that’s pulled from the remote Tempest API, which is a lot more than just what comes off any single piece of hardware.
Here are a couple public pages for you:
WeatherFlow-Tempest Non-commercial Terms of Use (hard to read, written by actual lawyers)
Remote Data Access Usage Policy (more legible for most people, although lawyers edited this one too)
Thanks David. To me being able to use info resulting from your public data and just needing to mention attribution seems like a fine policy that’s fair to all.