Weather Alerts

[stretch2009]

Any way of having a module that would announce weather alerts over the intercoms on the phones? Possibly be able to choose which alerts to send and which phones to send them to?

 

[tm1000]

This already exists. I just can't remember the extension

Any way of having a module that would announce weather alerts over the intercoms on the phones? Possibly be able to choose which alerts to send and which phones to send them to?

 

[stretch2009]

This already exists. I just can't remember the extension

I knew there was extensions to hear the weather, but I could not find anything that would automatically announce alerts over the intercom.

 

[darmock]

I knew there was extensions to hear the weather, but I could not find anything that would automatically announce alerts over the intercom.

I had a project that interfaced a standard weather radio into asterisk by using a VOX that triggered a grandstream handytone to go offhook and autodial the page number. I built a copy of this into a standard rackmount 1U box. The real problem was resetting things after the alert was over reliably.

Then there is a lot of chatter about a software only protocol which is what I think you are after. There is access to the EAS system using the internet via the IPAS format. One just has to get the time to site down and write the glue to make it interoperable. There is also the ATOM format which has some potential also. I have been meaning to bring this up with the team to see if this is something they would be interested in.


Tom

 

[kenn10]

Along Those Lines / Somewhat Off Topic

It would be nice to have Asterisk do some auto-announce things for sure. My Home Automation system nicely handles the weather alerts but I could see someone wanting this for Asterisk/FPBX. I can already ftp a text weather alert file to my PIAF server from my home automation server but have not mastered getting it to make announcements via Flite or Cepstral to my phones.

I would like to see a project that would allow Asterisk to announce certain things. In the USA, if you've ever been to a CVS pharmacy, you've probably heard some of the neat stuff their (proprietary) system does. It will announce on the pharmacy phones something like "Pharmacy Call on Line One" or "Doctors Office on Line 3." Their system has an IVR front-ending the inbound calls, places them on hold (or park) and then announces rather than just ringing the phones.

I was never successful in getting the delayed paging module to page a FreePBX page-group on Asterisk and it seems that triggering certain auto-announce items may be a challenge.

Has anyone else tried to play with this?

 

[vcallaway]

What about using text to speech and dump it out the sound card?

 

[phonebuff]

For those who might want to play with this you should look at the Commom Alerting Protocol (CAP V1.1) as your source as it has a parsable data stream tha most of the other sources (WXWire Ect.) do not yet have. http://alerts.weather.gov/

CAP is the basis for the new EAS and most other All Hazard warning system that the Feds are moving towards and while NWS is behind a little (CAP V1.1 vs V1.2) at least it starting to stabilize.

You are going to have to potential issues. The first issue is going to probably be a TTS vocabulary that will allow the message to "read" in a form that is understandable. While the second is identifing your facility is being warning. The current system of FIPS codes can result in large areas being warned for small centralized storms. Thus the "cry wolf" syndrom. Futhure systems based in CAP will be more GEO based with warnings that include a polygon and you can determine if your area of interet / facility is in the Polygom ..

Good Luck with this..

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http://www.awareforum.org/ -- Good Blog on the subject.