AeroWX

Did you ever fly a model rocket when you were a kid?  Nowadays model rockets 
can be much larger and go much higher.  Some of these rockets are 20 feet tall 
and can go as high as 4 miles (or more).  When you fly such large rockets you 
have to be very careful and know what you are doing.  We have a need for 
accurate and timely weather information at our club launches.  More than just 
the temperature and wind speed.  We need weather information much like what 
pilots use.  This information is available on the internet, but the file 
formats leave much to be desired and are not easily readable from a cell phone.

This project is designed to retrieve this information from the National Weather 
Service (NWS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) web 
sites, reformat it, and make it available on a cell phone.

The information will be downloaded from the NWS and NOAA FTP servers as simple 
ASCII text files.  It will be decoded (not a trivial feat) to extract the 
needed data, the data will be cached on the local file server, then made 
available to any smart cell phone via a mobile app.  Since the data will only 
be downloaded from the FTP servers when it changes (roughly every hour), it 
will minimize the load on the NWS and NOAA FTP servers.  Caching on the local 
server will provide some continuity of service should there be problems at NWS 
and NOAA's servers.  The data will be transmitted to the cell phone without 
any presentation information (color, graphics, screen resolution, size, or 
orientation) to save on data transmission costs as well as allowing the 
individual phone app designer (and end users) the ability of customizing the 
display as they wish.  The intention is to create only a Android App for this 
project, however there may be a possibility of mirroring the app design onto 
other phones like Windows and iPhone if time (and experience) permits.