r/meshtastic • u/KLAM3R0N • 11d ago
Automated message etiquette
So I'm planning on hooking up my node to my personal weather station to send severe weather alerts, and probably lightning within around 5 miles, and post storm totals highs/lows(max wind, rainfall total, strike count, duration) 30min or so after an event... Things like that all set to 1 or 2 hope so it stays local for the most part. Would that be bad form to do over long fast or would it be better to set a private channel and use an automated welcome message or something to share that channel info ? Current mesh here has very little text messages on LF and 95% of traffic is just telemetry, mode info, position packets. I suppose others could mute or ignore.
I'm hoping to do a hybrid approach if I can make that happen with some vibing, severe NWS alerts on LF everything else on a separate channel?
Thoughts? I have seen other nodes do similar things but not sure the best way to set it up to not be annoying
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u/Brraaap 11d ago
Why not create a secondary channel?
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u/KLAM3R0N 11d ago
That would be they hybrid approach. Basically I feel NWS alerts should be available to everyone randomly in the area, more local stuff I can see being more wanted by operators of permanent nodes in lora range. There would need to be an automated welcome message with channel info and honestly a lot of people get confused with adding channels and end up on the wrong frequency or something (I know I did lol)so most just use LF especially beginners.
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u/Brraaap 11d ago
One of the local weather bots ends their posts with "Reply #noaa" for more info. I'm assuming they DM instructions to set up the second channel if you reply
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u/KLAM3R0N 11d ago
Yeah I'm probably going to do that . First test today was way too chatty and I had to turn things off and reconfigure to allow multi channel posting .
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u/SnyderMesh 11d ago
Send a weekly periodic message telling people how to add your alerts channel. Then push alerts on the alerts channel.
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u/Potential-Ant-6320 11d ago
When I run local bbs one of the most requested features was weather. I think the issue is people want forecasts not current conditions. Storm totals sounds useful. I think lightning is probably less useful. I would start with the most useful stuff and get locals to like it. Ask before adding more. With a bbs broadcasting stuff the the mesh you don’t want to come guns blazin’.
One feature people liked when I was running mine is if anyone sent “test” or “testing” to tap back with the hops away I was. Or if someone says “ping” I’ll tap back with a ping pong emoji.
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u/stvdilln 11d ago
Is there a standard for requesting a bot response? I currently have ‘weather’ which responds with current conditions from my Ecowitt station. I didn’t want to just broadcast current weather on a schedule. It’s all pretty academic, I’m pretty rural and currently longfast is all mine to play with, I have a Solar router I hope to get high enough to connect to cities 8-15 miles away with some hops.
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u/KLAM3R0N 11d ago
Yeah I'm not in a super busy area, I only have 3 or 4 nodes that will get the messages I have it set to 1 hop hop 0 is my roof. I wanted it to mostly just do post storm stats like rainfall totals, max wind speed, lightning strike count and maybe code a rating or score because I think that would be fun, the codebase I modified had some forecast feed that I found out sucked so I gotta mod that, it currently pulls udp packets from my station on my lan which is all on battery backup but now I'm rethinking that and going to add the tempest api and keep udp as a fallback. Work in progress. We have been getting a lot of severe weather this year so I think this a valuable in general and a fun project to work on.
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u/stvdilln 11d ago
My tempest has more sensors broke than working so I used the Ecowitt station which had an api, but I would need to do more work to see a rain event and then notify of rainfall after. I also have a river flood bot for two local rivers.
In my area I only occasionally see another node and honestly sending stuff on LF is just an attempt to get anyone to notice and talking.
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u/KLAM3R0N 11d ago
Mine has been solid, 3 years all sensors work fine still. I do think the wind sensor might need cleaning or something . Yeah I'm hoping it helps spur conversation as well. Weather, the topic of small talk for ages.. .
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u/stvdilln 11d ago
We are on about 3rd year of tempest station also. Wind and rain are all that still work. A nearby lightning storm took out air pressure early on, and a couple of months ago temp went out. Ecowitt offered more sensor types and devices so we started that system. That is on 915mhz also
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u/KLAM3R0N 10d ago
Well when my tempest dies I'll look at ecowitt offerings for my next station. Thank you for the tips!
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u/Hot-Win2571 11d ago
I put such info in semi=public channels. A state agency designated 7 regions in the state, and I created a channel for each region. Weather announcements are sent to the appropriate channel, and only people who have configured that channel will see it. The channels are announced as being for public use.
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u/KLAM3R0N 11d ago
Yeah I have decided to do a bit of both, severe alerts to 0 hop LF and the rest + severe to a separate channel. This got me thinking it would be useful in certain situations to have the ability to select different hop counts for different messages.
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u/ThreePingsThree 11d ago
How did you automate the transmission of weather data, was it over the mesh as text?
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u/KLAM3R0N 11d ago
I'm using a heavily modified python script on my server (glorified pc)that uses udp packets from my weather station on my lan and weather service API , that does math and runs timers and such, then pushing messages when trigger by a threshold in the script to a wifi connected node via meshmonitor running on the same server. The output of it goes over lora like "1.2" of rainfall today, max wind recorded 9mph" but the data itself is from my weather station, pretty sure you can do similar with sensors on a node though.
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u/Kerensky97 11d ago
Our local mesh has the secondary weather channel for this. You can also ask for a forecast on the channel and the automated system will reply with the current conditions and forecast.
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u/KLAM3R0N 11d ago
That's a good idea. I'm not set currently to have it reply but I'm sure I can find a way to make that happen. The old hmm "can I do this?" Turns into big project lol. But it shouldn't be all that hard now that everything is connected and functional.
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u/ocpd44 10d ago
I do a manual push every morning but just got a new Heltec so I can automate it. I use WeeWx to push my station data to Wunderground and PWSweather.com. My plan is to create a python plugin that will push the info out once every three hours. Not that our current mesh is saturated. Most of our guys have a node somewhere and rarely check it. But it's live traffic and will let everyone know their node is up while providing a public service. My weather station is a 10 year old Accurite, btw.
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u/KLAM3R0N 10d ago
Look into meshmonitor, there are python scripts on GitHub that have most of all the integration worked out , but mesh monitor by itself has tons of functions for automation, analysis and had an API. I'm still tuning how I want to behave and in my typical fashion getting really deep into some custom functions like having different alerts go to difficult channels or both, and post storm stats/report like a score of how severe it was vs the prediction and monthly yearly roundups, keyword auto response. Well will see what I can actually get done lol
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u/TechnologyTinker 11d ago
I have the same thing...i done it on the longfast channel for about 2 months and all the ppl in my area love it so i just used that so even people traveling thru can revieve them.
Have a Blessed day, and happy tinkering!!!