-->September 6th, 2025<--
Thank you to GolfCharlie and Claude Code for fixing the code to work with the newly changed FAA API! They have saved a lot of time. A new image has been created and will be uploaded today and available later tonight. If you don't want or need the image, you can visit https://github.com/markyharris/livesectional and incorporate the changes into your board now.
--->September 5th, 2025<--
There has been another change to the FAA API which has again broke the map. We are currently working on this. Check back for fix. If you have the fix please post it. - Mark
So, I was doing some tidying up work on my large build, which covers much of northern California (roughly speaking, the map is MRY in the southwest to RNO in the northeast). I'd previously had trouble with the LEDs "acting weird" that went away when I soldered a bunch of stuff in place. Tonight I plugged in the norcal build, and a bunch of LEDs were flashing randomly.
This is one of those cases where you should look outside, or read the newspaper. Yeah, I had flashing LEDs that were going red/blue/green to white and back. Because those are all the airports that are reporting either FU (smoke), HZ (haze), or both in the latest METAR. What I thought was another weird squirrely connection problem was the map working as expected - I just didn't recognize all the features the software has!
One troubleshooting feature that would be nice is if the airport editor showed what the expected state of the LED was. If an airport is VFR, put a green ball on the line with the airport code in the editor, for example.
That's a great insight! Thank you for pointing that out. - Mark
The catch was looking at all the LEDs and realizing that it wasn't random flashes, but it was the same airports going to the same colors!
Here's the view of the flashing; compare to the TFRs on skyvector.com...
It looks like haze (HZ) in a METAR flashes white. Does the code handle smoke (FU)? It seemed like some airports that have lots of smoke were not blinking.
Yes, FU is checked for; here's a snippet of code that shows the weather characterized as such.
#Dust Sand and/or Ash
wx_dustsandash_ck = ["DU", "SA", "HZ", "FU", "VA", "BLDU", "BLSA", "PO", "VCSS", "SS", "+SS",]
