Known Issues:The plugin currently requires a direct connection to the internet to function, i.e. it will not work if you have to go through a proxy. I am looking into fixing this limitation.
Usage guide:This plugin is not quite as simple as the other "drag-drop-display" plugins included in LCDHost. Here is a simple guild to get you displaying weather on your G19.
1. Firstly make sure you've installed the plugin. Put the dll file in your LCDHost's plugin folder then open the plugins tab, select the dll from the list and tick the "Allow this plugin to load" box, then press load. In future LCDHost will remember that you've chosen to trust this plugin and will load it automatically, although if you need to patch it later you will need to re-tick this box.
2. Next extract the images set folders included in the package. Ideally you'll want to create your own set later on, in which case you should be able to use the included imagemap.txt files as a template. In any case you can place these icon sets anywhere you like, but I recommend placing them in the theme folder you intend to use.
3. Open LCDHost and go to the layout designer window. Expand the weather list in the classes box, and add a weather connector. You really should only add one weather connector to a layout.
4. Type your location into the location box. The box below it will display the best match for what you have currently typed in. If you're not getting the right answer (for example if you live in Perth, Perthshire, Scotland the best fit for just "Perth" will be quite a few miles away), just keep typing. Usually "city name" or "city name country" is enough, but state / region / county can help.
5. Once your desired location is displayed, select your units (Metric or Imperial) then drop a Weather Text object on the layout. You can add it anywhere (there is no need to make everything a child of the connector, although this does help when you want to maintain the layout). New text items default to showing the city name. Leave this and add a second text box and this time change the value type to "Wind: Chill" - this is the "feels like" temperature outside, i.e. the temperature taking into account the wind chill factor, right now (according to Yahoo, anyway).
6. Now add a Weather Image object. These are a little trickier as they require you to have correctly set up an icon set. In step 2 you extracted two working set from the LH_Weather download file, so for now you don't need to worry about making a working "set".
- Your new icon should already be showing a message in the grey box below the "File" setting, something like "Weather Code 11 received for Day; resolved to image:" this text tells you the image is already picking up weather codes from yahoo (via the connector) and is working out whether it's day or night (using the sunrise/sunset data from Yahoo). All it needs is a way to combine the code and the time of day into a choice of image. This is the purpose of the image map file.
7. Click the browse button ("...") next to the file box and find the "Yahoo! Icons" set. Select the imagemap.txt file in this folder. Immediately an icon will appear in the window (resize it now to make it bigger), and you'll notice that the feedback box now shows an image name after the "resolved to:" text, indicating the weather code & day/night combination has been found in the list.
Congratulations you now have live weather information on your G19 screen.
Useful hints:
- I recommend keeping icon sets in their own folder. There are 48 weather codes, so you could easily have almost 100 icons in a set.
- Image map files need to be in the same location as their images. The file can be called whatever you like.
- Creating an image map is easy. I would suggest you start from the example map in Yahoo Icons, but basically you just need a code, a day image name and a night image name each separated by a tab and each on it's own line. I prefer to create them in excel and save to tab-seperated text file, but whatever works for you.
- The image map file uses a semicolon ";" to denote comments. It's quite helpful to include the weather code's meaning at the end of each line after a semi-colon.
- The weather code 3200 is the standard code for "weather is undefined". If no image can be found for a certain code in the definition file, the weather image object will then try to find a code for 3200 and display that before giving up and showing no icon. This means if you just want to use a single day/night icon you can just define icons for the 3200 code only.
- More information on the weather codes can be found on Yahoo's weather api page
