Tag Archives: git

Air Quality Index Bot

After the devastating Northern California wildfires, I found myself looking at AirNow multiple times a day. Also at work, like many Bay Area tech companies, we use HipChat (or Slack). Naturally I was inclined to issue a slash command to get the latest air quality index (AQI) for my area in a chat channel. I couldn’t find a good AQI bot so I wrote one.

Installation for Heroku is on the README of the project. How to add a slash command for HipChat and/or Slack are not covered in this blog entry, but it’s very easy 🙂 (I used /aq <zipcode> for command)

The bot (really an API endpoint) is here in my github repo. Feel free to use, improve, contribute to it.

Yaesu FTM-400XDR and Chirp

I use Chirp. I love it. It’s the only way to program my Baofeng UV-R(+) radios… Period.

Also I love that I can download repeater settings according to a zip code, county, state, etc…

I wanted to use Chirp for my Yaesu FTM-400XDR. However it looks like Chirp doesn’t support this model. So my initial reaction was to create the repeater list with Chirp, export on CSV, and import it to Yaesu.

But, that wasn’t possible either since Yaesu expects the data in a different order and format.

I wrote a small python script that rearranges and reformats the CSV file to the expected import file for the Yaesu’s own software. Check out the README to read how you can install and use the script.

By the way, Yaesu’s software to program the radio doesn’t work on Mac OS X natively, since it’s a Windows software. I managed to run it on Mac OS X using wine. But that’s another blog entry…