​New sensor for alerts by NSW rural fire service - feedback welcome

Share your Projects!
1

​If you live in a bush fire prone area like me, keeping yourself informed about and prepared for fires near you is important.
The role that a home automation system can play when it comes to bush fire alerts or back burning activities could for example be notifying users about certain alerts, monitoring the air quality, or maybe automatically closing windows.
​
Here in Australia, the NSW rural fire service​ publishes alerts in GeoJSON format, and HA can compare those alerts with the coordinates of your HA instance, and filter alerts by distance to only display those near you.
​
If you are interested in trying a pre-release of this new sensor (tested with HA 0.48), please follow these instructions:

  • Copy the file nsw_rural_fire_service.py into <config_dir>/custom_components/sensor/
  • add a new sensor to your configuration:
​sensor:
  - platform: nsw_rural_fire_service
  • The default filter distance between your HA coordinates, and the alerts is 20km. You can change that distance if required by adding the radius parameter, expecting a float value in km:
​sensor:
  - platform: nsw_rural_fire_service
    radius: 10.0
  • ​Restart HA
  • ​Four new sensors should appear that you can arrange and group as usual
  • ​The data is updated every 5 minutes
  • ​Details including location and status are displayed in the info dialogue

1014×600 27.3 KB

​_Disclaimer:_ Do not use this new sensor as the sole source of information on bush fires near you. The software may contain bugs, the information may be incomplete or inaccurate.

Please let me know if the sensor works for you and how useful you find it. Is there anything missing from your point of view? Any other use-cases you could think of where this type of sensor may be useful?

3 Likes
2

@exxamalte Thanks for sharing and I was thinking to do the same here with weather service for lighstorm, strong wind or heat alert but unhappy they have no feed usable :frowning:

1 Like
3

This is great! Keep up the good work!

1 Like
4

@vincen: I haven’t found any other useful GeoJSON feeds here either. Let me know if you do find something, since I could refactor the code in a way that would allow adding multiple concrete services on top of a generic GeoJSON compatible service.

1 Like
5

@exxamalte Thanks for offer and will let you know if I find something :wink: But in the meantime it would be nice to get something similar with RSS feed as lot of information or alert services use RSS feeds here to do it !!

6

An adequate alternative to GeoJSON would be GeoRSS - the service I am interested in here does provide the same bush fire data in GeoRSS format. I’ll look into it.

7

@exxamalte Thanks for the update and will look what is avalaible around here ! I had found a stream from rail train that would allow to get in real time list of departure/arrival of trains in any train station of country ! it would be nice for travellers or commuters but it’s only avalaible in RSS :frowning:

8

New more generic version available based on GeoRSS feeds.
Please take a look and let me know what you think.

1 Like