A week or two ago I wrote a service or dab-bot to work with the alert command. This was actually a much larger undertaking as I had to break the alert command into two pieces: the actual command and a backend service. The original alert command was heavily tied to the PulsePoint API which is used in the Seattle area. This is where the author of the meshcore-bot code lives. So to keep (mostly) backward compatibility I had to rewrite the PulsePoint part into a backend service also.
Once this was done I was able to work on a new backend service to connect the Volusia County Sheriff’s dispatch active calls to dab-bot. Now I wish that all the 911 dispatch calls were available, but only the Sheriff’s department makes the calls available through https://vcso.us/ActiveCalls/. That is all there is to work with.
There is still some work going on with the query interface of the alert command, but it is functional enough for general use now and I am making it available to everyone.
Using it is quite simple. In a channel that dab-bot will respond to (like #bot or #test) type in alert followed by a city name. dab-bot will send back a response that lists the current calls that are currently active. It may not give you all the calls though because of the limitation of the number of characters allowed in a message and to avoid flooding the MeshCore network with extra traffic. I still have to order the response by priority (each call has a priority assigned ranging from P1 – P6) that way the highest priority calls make it into the response.
One thing that has been improved through this change and building the backend alert service is that now an alert service can make periodic postings. So I have created a new channel (#alerts) that will receive the P1 and P2 calls. All you need to do is add the channel #alerts to your companion and you will start to see the alerts throughout the day. dab-bot will also respond to the alert command in #alerts.
If you see any problems with querying for calls or any odd behavior from the alert service, please let me know so that I can look into it.