Hi Andrew,
I'll take a look into that. Winters are long here, so I've been thinking about other potential data sources (other than weather) that might be interesting to xmit through APRS. I'm aware of lightning and geiger counter maps that have crowd-sourced data. I think these just go directly to their aggregating servers via TCP/IP, no radio involved.
Having YAAC work off a file wouldn't be necessary, it would be easy enough to implement the nc method if I got the packet format correct. Then a person could issue a cron job or whatever other method they wanted to call a script around nc to assemble and transmit the packet.
73, KD0KZE / Paul
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On 1/6/22 15:27, Andrew P. wrote:
Not exactly in the way I'm guessing you're thinking of.
The ExternalMessageSource port type was created for exactly the reason you're talking about: so an arbitrary message can be sent through the application at any time. However, it doesn't create the message; the external application has to compose the APRS packet. I once thought about adding macro support so you could send a position message and have various parameters (latitude, longitude, timestamp, etc.) be plugged in on-the-fly from the YAAC configuration and runtime state, but there never was enough demand for more functionality there (and enough other places in the code that did have demands) that I never got around to it.
The problem with reading a file is that you can't asynchronously detect when the file has been changed. I'm not particularly thrilled with the WXNOW.TXT port driver, because it has to poll the file every few seconds to see if it has been changed, which isn't the most efficient way to do things. And there's no platform-portable way (other than network sockets) to poke the YAAC application from outside the application to tell it to do something programmatically.
Thankfully, someone wrote the NetCat command (sometimes called nc or ncat) which provides the relay between network sockets and files or shell scripts, so if you wanted to copy a file containing a packet into YAAC, you could use the 'nc' command to copy it to the External Message Source listening socket, which would cause the message to be transmitted.
Hope that helps.
Andrew, KA2DDO
author of YAAC
________________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Paul Bramscher
Sent: Wednesday, January 5, 2022 9:36 PM
Greetings Andrew,
I'm wondering whether YAAC is capable of being programmatically
"triggered" to send a beacon, and whether it can read the contents of a
file as its message.
I see some reference in the docs
() but I
don't know if that's quite what I'm looking for. It would be
interesting if there was a sort of API such that we might provide a
beacon message and a command to transmit on-demand.
I don't have a particular use-case, but it seems that a number of
possibilities might exist (Linux user here).
73, KD0KZE / Paul
