Local on the 8s

In the 1990s, The Weather Channel installed a dedicated computer — the WeatherStar 4000 — at every cable headend in America. It overlaid your local forecast onto the national feed: blue gradient backgrounds, that font, the smooth jazz. WeatherStar 4000+ by Matt Walsh (MIT licensed) recreates the whole unit in the browser, down to the typeface rendering and display timing. (The headings on this page are set in the real Star4000 typeface, served from the same folder.)

We run the project’s official static build — the same files its npm run build emits — vendored under /ws4kp/ on this site. There is no backend component: your browser calls api.weather.gov directly for observations, forecasts, and hazards, exactly as if you had installed it yourself. The frame above pins the location to Springfield with a standard permalink query string.

/ws4kp/index.html?latLonQuery=Springfield,+MO&latLon={"lat":37.209,"lon":-93.2923}

Partly because anyone who grew up here will feel something when the Current Conditions screen rolls. But mostly because it demonstrates the quiet superpower of modern open source: a broadcast-grade product from 1994, faithfully recreated, running on free government data, deployable by copying a folder. If a hobby project can do that, imagine what your back office is overpaying for. Ask us.