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          }`   . ~   =    ~  =  ~   -  ~    - _
.        }   ~ .__,_O     ` ~ _   ~  ^  ~  -   
       `}` - =    /#/`-'     -   ~   =   ~  _ ~
  ~ .   }   ~ -   |^\   _ ~ _  - ~ -_  =  _  
       }`  _____ /_  /____ - ~ _   ~ _ 

Want to talk to the network of NOAA buoy's but don't want to parse the data. WAVE_THING is a gateway for you!

WAVE_THING acts as a HTTP gateway for translating the tabular data of the NOAA buoy API into JSON or XML.

See it running here

WAVE_THING

WAVE_THING is a Python 3 application. To install Pyhton 3 if you don't already have it see this guide that covers the process for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

The access to WAVE_THING is through HTTP. It uses the Flask micro service to handle HTTP requests and responses. Installing Flask is taken care by the steps in the To Run section of this document. It is pretty painless.

To run:

pip install -r requirments.txt
python application.py

The gateway will now be accessible at http://127.0.0.1:5000/.

To use:

To make a call against the NOAA data set the API path is

/api/buoytalk/[buoy id]/[buoy data set]

The valid values for the buoy data set are defined on the NOAA website.

Note that not all buoys have all data sets available and WAVE_THING is not implementing all translations yet.

Command line example with CURL

curl -H "Accept: application/json"  http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/buoytalk/42001/spec

Programmatic example with Python

import requests

# Which buoy and it's data I want
desired_buoy_id=42001
desired_buoy_data_set="txt"

# Make the request to the locally running instance of WAVE_THING
wave_thing_request = requests.get("http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/buoytalk/{buoy_id}/{buoy_data_set}".format(
    buoy_id=desired_buoy_id,
    buoy_data_set=desired_buoy_data_set
))

if wave_thing_request.status_code != 200:
    # Something went wrong
    print(wave_thing_request.text)
else:
    # Print the data!
    print(wave_thing_request.json())

Full documentation of the API in SWAGGER format is in the file docs/wave_thing_api.swagger.yaml.

Internet accessible WAVE_THING with AWS:

WAVE_THING will also run fine on AWS ElasticBeanStalk. Follow the steps on the AWS documentation page to deploy on ElasticBeanstalk.