Radar graphics in a text world.

This is a continuation of the text in a graphics world instructable (http://www.instructables.com/id/graphics-in-a-text-world/) . Getting the weather is important. One nice thing about this instructable is that you can take graphical images and turn them into text. That saves a lot of disk space (if you delete the image once it is converted).. You can then take the text images and simulate page flipping so that it seems as if you were looking at live radar. The images will not be as crisp as a real picture image, but if you look at all the converted images over time will give you a good idea of what is going on. The is especially true if a big storm is coming. 

Note: for some reason again. the original text was was wiped out, so am just winging this frame. There is also a step missing, I added. 

Step 1: Get the pics.

We need to create a batch file that will collect the pictures using cron.  You will need to find the three letter designation of your area. You can get that from the national weather service. Note we put d.sh in the bin directory because it is in the executable directory path.

d.sh:
[code]
DAY=$(date +"%m%d%y%H%M%S")
# picfn="pic$DAY.png"
# echo $picfn
wget http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/Thumbs/FWS.png -O fws$DAY.png
[/code]

We will set it to grab a picture once a minute. AT most once a hour is fine unless you know you have inclement weather coming. Set the collection at 1 per minute for our example. That will fill up a hard drive quickly so be careful.

$ chmod +x d.sh

$ crontab -e to add d.sh to your cronfile.