The FarmAssist technical services team announces the development of FarmWAN, a Q-SYS plug-in that provides Q-SYS programmers the ability to trigger operations based on weather activity for a given location.
FarmWAN scans the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather database every minute for active alerts that apply to the provided coordinates and compares the parameters of the alert to the configuration to determine if an alert should be triggered.
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Standard parameter filters such as Urgency, Severity, and Certainty as well as Response Type are programmable to suit each deployment. "Must Include" and "Must Exclude" keywords can also be specified to meet a broad range of application requirements.
Applications for FarmWAN include weather-based notifications for touch panels/digital signage and the automation of an AV system based on emergency weather events. Paired with FarmTTS Text-to-Speech plug-in, FarmWAN can provide audible weather alert notifications—ideal for emergency public safety services (fire stations, EMTs, police departments), schools, hospitals and more.
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“FarmWAN was initially developed for an education client to not only mute the AV system in the event of an emergency, but to also provide early information regarding the details of the weather alert,” explained The Farm’s vice president of technical services, Andrew Stanley. “We’re leveraging the Internet and writing applications that take all relevant information and bring it to a localized system in a useful application. And this doesn’t just apply to weather alerts—if you wanted to bring in sports scores, lotto numbers, or traffic information—we can write a script that finds the pertinent data, parses it, and then brings it to your localized AV system.”
