Australian BOM Rain Radar Card

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IMPORTANT
On the 25 Sep 2021 the repository was relocated to a new GitHub account with the release of v1.3.4. If you currently have it installed using HACS you will need to go into HACS and remove the old custom repository (the three dots up the top right) and add the new repository and then update the card. The link below has been updated to the new location. Your existing configs will not be lost.
Sorry for any inconvenience.

I have been working on a new improved rain radar card using the new Australian BOM radar tiles. First release is available, it is functional but still a few things to work on.

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You know there is a core BOM Radar integration already? How is this different to that?

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Well there’s this:

The new Austalian BOM radar products (mobile app and https://weather.bom.gov.au/) now use map tiles to distribute the radar images. This allow for one continous map that can be zoomed and panned seamlessly.

And:

…you can create radar loops of up to at least 24 hours.

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The existing integration is not that great. It uses the old BOM radar images, which are pretty limited. On top of that the layering in the gif that is produces is incorrect. When it is raining all of the place names are hidden under the coloured images, so you lose all reference. Because it is a generated gif, there is no option to have controls to pause, step forward/backward. Also since the images it uses are 512px square and it scales them to 492px square everything gets really blurry.
This card tries to address that. The images are not scaled. You can set the center point of the map anywhere at whatever zoom level you care for. You can also have a home icon within this map wherever you choose. You can also set the number of frames to load and the animation delay for changing frames. You can pause the loop and step forward/backward. You can pan and zoom the radar. I think all good things.

1 Like
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I must admit though it is not particularly mobile friendly right now. Something to add to the todo list.

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Actually I just tried it… nice! It looks washed out though. Is a dark mode possible?

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Not enough contrast. Also only shows a very few place names even at maximum zoom and roads features not well defined.
But it’s great! Good addition.

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I completely agree. Those are the map tile layers that the BOM is using for the new radar services. I am going to look around and see if I can find other sources for tiles that look better (or at least an alternative). It would be possible to substitute any map tiles based on OpenStreetMap data. I also dislike the lack of place names, but once again that is the layers the BOM have chosen to use.

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The map card uses the same map and I can set that to dark mode in lovelace which looks better in the one i use for geolocation entities…

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V1.1.0 released.
Updated to use the same map source as the map card. This allows dark mode. Thanks to @DavidFW1960 for the suggestion of where to look for different maps.
Added an option called extra_labels. When set to true it uses the labels from one zoom level higher. This results in more labels, but makes them half the size, so a bit difficult to read.
A few other minor fixes.

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hmm… it’s zooming out to the whole of Australia?
per the docs:

          - type: 'custom:bom-radar-card'
            frame_count: 10
            lattitude: '-33.425018'
            longitude: '151.342224'
            markerIcon: 'true'
            markerLattitude: '-33.425018'
            markerLongitude: '151.342224'
            show_marker: true
            show_range: true
            zoomLevel: '10'
            extra_labels: true
            map_style: 'dark'

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also tried marker_Lattitude etc…

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Found the secret sauce…

          - type: 'custom:bom-radar-card'
            frame_count: 10
            center_lattitude: '-33.425018'
            center_longitude: '151.342224'
            markerIcon: 'true'
            marker_Lattitude: '-33.425018'
            marker_Longitude: '151.342224'
            show_marker: true
            show_range: true
            zoom_level: '10'
            extra_labels: true
            map_style: 'dark'

So the docs/examples don’t reflect zoom_level, center_lattitude etc
Also Latitude not Lattitude…

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Looks good… much better I think…

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Yes. My bad. I made settings more consistent and updated them in the Options table, but forgot the examples. realease V1.1.1 has the readme corrected.

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Bugger missed zoom_level. I will fix that in the next set of updates.

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also spelling of latitude… only 1 t… not lattitude

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Fixed now. note that v1.2.0 will look odd until you update the settings to the correct spelling. Thanks for taking the time to let me know about these.

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looking much better now. Thanks.

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it really hates mobile devices… Would be good if you could zoom a bit more…

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Yup, I already mentioned that there were issues on mobile devices. I have that on my list of things to look at in the near future.
Not sure what you mean by being able to zoom more. At maximum zoom the image covers about 40 square km. The BOM only publish radar tiles for zoom levels of 4-10, that means any zoom outside of those results in blank tiles being displayed.
I have a few busy days, so it may take me until late this week before getting a chance to look into things.

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is this on HACS? i cant see it there

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Currently you need to add it as a custom repository in HACS. Go into HACS and click the three … up the top right and select ‘Custom Repositories’. The enter the repo’s url in the dialog.