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Show HN: Live weather radar wallpaper for Android (play.google.com)
6 points by ryandvm 72 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments
My very small team has built an Android live wallpaper that displays the current NEXRAD weather radar data as your Android phone’s live wallpaper.

The app automatically selects the nearest radar site using coarse location permissions, or you can manually choose a location. Everything is size optimized and only updates when the wallpaper is being viewed to minimize battery footprint.

Interesting technical bits:

  - Using the US National Weather Service public radar feed (via public S3 bucket)
  - Custom radar volume data decoder written in Go and running as AWS Lambdas (triggered by S3 bucket events)
  - Custom rendering API
  - Kotlin Android app is <10 MB (no cross-platform bloat)
Available on Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.radarlove....

Happy to answer questions about the radar data processing pipeline, infrastructure, or the live wallpaper implementation. Also open to interesting opportunities for collaboration...



When global?


Part of the reason this is possible for us is because the National Weather Service currently provides a free feed of raw (Level 2) radar data from their NEXRAD network (https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-nexrad/).

Assuming other national data feeds could be acquired and decoded at a fairly low cost, then other feeds could theoretically be added.

I suppose whether or not this project is successful is probably the determining factor in our case.


Oh I see. Yeah that could be a bit of a constraint couldn't it? Well I wish you luck.


"Your device isn't compatible with this version."

I hate that Google Play doesn't tell you why.


I know that some Motorola devices don't support Live Wallpapers. I'm guessing that's the problem because otherwise the permissions we use are pretty basic (coarse location, network access).


Yeah, this is not the first time I've run into app issues with my Moto phone. I won't be buying another one after this one wears out.




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