Texting myself the weather every day
4 days ago
- #weather
- #automation
- #sms
- Automating daily weather updates via SMS to avoid manually checking the Weather app.
- Initial solution used Zapier for simplicity but lacked customization (e.g., fixed ~7am delivery).
- Upgraded to a self-coded solution with TypeScript, Open-Meteo API, Twilio, and GitHub Actions for more control.
- Open-Meteo API provides weather data from multiple national services, using efficient flatbuffers for data serialization.
- Custom time range (7am-11pm) for weather data to avoid irrelevant early morning forecasts.
- Twilio used for SMS delivery, costing ~£0.0463 per message plus £0.89022/month for a phone number.
- GitHub Actions scheduled the daily SMS, though timezone adjustments were needed (BST vs. UTC).
- Future improvements: more detailed weather summaries beyond WMO codes, similar to Zapier's output.