#“Bandon Flood Data (FEWS) now available on Cosm/Pachube”
When I announced the availablity of Open Data on Google Fusion Tables for the Bandon Flood Early Warning System (FEWS) last year, one suggestion that was made to me by Imogen Bertin was to put it up on Pachube (now renamed to the slightly less obscure Cosm). I gave it a go but couldn’t figure it out. Despite providing it with the CSV link to the Fusion Table, it never did anything with the data. So I gave up due to busyness.
This evening, I had another go. This time it was worse. Anything I tried on the data feed resulted in both Chrome and Firefox hanging. I decided to bite the bullet and figure out how to post data directly rather than having them poll. Turns out it’s pretty easy.
Now I know this isn’t exactly the model that people have in mind for the Open Internet of Things but it works:
- A meter on the bridge in Bandon measures the river level.
- Somehow that is sent to the Bandon Flood Warning site (mobile?)
- It updates the level on the home page once per hour
- I then run a script also once per hour on an Amazon EC2 instance in Dublin, to screen scrape that value
- The script then saves it to a Google Fusion Table somewhere on the planet.
- I now also send that via http POST to the Cosm API
- You can then access that dataviaJSON,XMLandCSV
I’m still waiting for someone to do a mashup with that data, rainfall data at Cork Airport and tidal data. I would but I’m having too much fun playing with Raspberry Pi and Arduino. Eventually I may join the dots and create a little Arduino+RPi weather station out in the garden which reports directly to Cosm using wifi to my house.
In the meantime, enjoy!