Has anyone developed or tried to develop an input connector for the Vaisala lightning tracking system? Mainly something that will read/receive the UALF feed from the AP5000 device.
The development team has not researched development of a connector for the specific package you mention (the AP5000 from Vaisala). We typically look to the community to build out these types of connectors.
In the case of the Universal ASCII Lightning Format (UALF) however, you may be able to leverage out-of-the-box components. Briefly looking over the documents at the links below, it looks like UALF is simple ascii text, tab delimited, numeric fields. This would suggest that you could pair the existing Text adapter with an appropriate transport to design a custom connector without necessarily needing to leverage the GeoEvent Processor API to develop any actual code.
In general, this is the workflow we follow when custom connectors (or other GEP service components such as custom processors) are needed:
Step 1: We typically look for partners to build the components needed to support their respective systems.
A couple of examples: - Exact Earth is building a connector for their AIS Vessel data - We have AGI building a connector to output to their CESIUM web client.
Partners will be making custom connectors available to the community via the GeoEvent Processor gallery via the �??Partner Gallery�??.
Step 2: If that does not make sense, we look to Esri solution teams to build out the needed components for their respective domains:
A couple of examples - The Emergency Response team is building out a CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) connector - The Defense team is planning on building out connectors for military formats/systems that are being demand by their customer base
These solution teams would make their connectors available as part of their solution and/or via the GeoEvent Processor gallery.
Step 3: If that does not make sense or cannot be supported then Esri Professional services could be contracted to build the needed components as a consulting project. If it could be agreed to, the development would ideally be made available to the community via the product gallery. I would imagine in most cases though that the components built would only be available to the customer since they are funding the work as a consulting project.
Step 4: If none of the above are feasible, then the customer (or someone else) can build a connector that meets their needs using the GeoEvent Software Development Kit (SDK).
