Long Island Lightning - How it is done

The Long Island Lightning page is generated on a P100 with 24MB running Win98. The lightning detector is a Boltek StormTracker and it is running Astrogenic's NexStorm software.

I was unhappy with the reliability of some 3rd party's upload function so I wrote my own script in REXX which is run by the Regina Rexx interpreter. I also wanted to remove the need to purchase any software so I found some screen capture code and hacked it to run from the command line.

The script runs in a loop and it pauses for a user configurable amount of time and takes a screen capture or it waits for a screen capture to be generated by the lighting detector software. It then converts it to a GIF using Nconvert, takes the past 10 GIFs, animates them using Gifsicle and then uses NcFTPPut to upload the two files to the FTP server.

The readme can be found here

Download the script and the support programs here