ISY Alerts

Last week, there was a tornado warning in my area - March coming in like a lion. I live less than a half mile from a fire station that has a siren that sounds with warnings. I also get text alerts from my city. But the first warning I got of the situation was from my ISY. Last year, shortly after I learned that Python was more than a reptile (not really, but I had never used it), I wrote a script that reads the NOAA feed for my area every three minutes, and if there is any kind of watch, warning or alert, a variable value is set on my ISY from the Raspberry Pi. When the weather is severe, certain lights flash and my z-wave siren sounds, along with a text message and an email; other warnings get a different notification from the system. Luckily, I was already up for the day and had just made a cup of tea, so the tea, a tablet, my phone and cat headed to the basement. After we were settled in, I heard the firehouse siren followed by the notification texts from civil authorities. But, my ISY beat them by a good ten minutes!

The good news is there was no damage in my neighborhood, and just a few small twigs down from the trees.

It's thanks to this forum and all the contributing members that I even knew to use the Raspberry Pi for supplementing the ISY, and expanding it beyond pure home automation. Just one of the benefits I have realized from choosing ISY.