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Main Metara screen
Inspiration
We were first inspired to do the project when we first saw it as a challenge at the hackathon because of the fact that a flight simulator weather add on someone in the group used had a METAR to understandable language system when converting raw data to weather data that could be used in the flight simulator in order to load in weather.
What it does
It basically it takes raw METAR weather data when you enter the input of an airport ICAO code into the white box from the area that airport is in from a government weather database that runs in real time, and converts that data it receives into something that can be readable (temperature, barometer, etc).
How we built it
We first built it up by coming up with the idea of reverse engineering the flight simulator add on's METAR converter system, and seeing that certain parts of the message correspond to different parts of the message after studying how METAR works. After that we had to decide on the language we were going to use to code our program, and we saw that using netbeans and java would work the best as it was our strong point.
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges we ran into include things such as syntax errors, problems with the network connection between the computer and the database, and things such as the GUI not working at times, especially after setting up the jar file and finding out that the image files won't work outside of the IDE in one instance of the development stage.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're very proud of the fact that we were able to finish the project on time, and that we came up with a good looking program that is able to connect to a database and use it to convert that weather data. Also Dimitri learned some code
What we learned
We mainly learned how to contact a database outside the IDE via the internet and use the data in that database to be translated into something else.
What's next for Metara
Metara can probably advance if we can find a way to get it out of its IDE stages, however as for now it is fully functional as an IDE project in NetBeans.
