A weekend project: build your own pre-flight dashboard

The shortest honest description of the Convek API is: you curl a URL with your home site's coordinates, and you get a day's soaring forecast back as JSON. Everything else is decoration. So this post is about the decoration that is actually worth building for yourself in a weekend - a personal pre-flight dashboard - and how little it takes.

First, the key. The free tier is 25 queries a day, no credit card, and - this is the part that matters - it is allowed in production. There is no bait-and-switch where the free data is shuffled or fake. You sign up, you get a key that looks like `cvk_live_...`, and you pass it as a bearer token: `Authorization: Bearer cvk_live_...`. That is the whole authentication story.

The smallest useful call is `/v1/site`: pass `region=gb`, `resolution=4km`, and a `lat` and `lon` inside the domain, and you get back the full field set for the current peak soaring hour - `day_rating`, `wstar_ms`, `hglider_agl_m`, cloudbase in both feet AGL and metres MSL, the wind stack, and the rest. One call, one site, one number you can glance at over breakfast.

For a dashboard you want the day, not the hour, so reach for `/v1/forecast` instead - same parameters, but it returns the whole day as an hourly array. Now you can render a little strip per site: day rating as a colour, `wstar_ms` and `cloudbase_agl_ft` as the headline numbers, `hglider_agl_m` for the ceiling, and a row of hours so you can see when the window opens and closes. Three or four home sites checked a couple of times a day sits comfortably inside 25 queries.

Two upgrades that cost almost nothing. Add the wind stack so the dashboard helps with the drive-or-not decision, not just the is-it-on one. And if you check the forecast early, pull the previous cycle for the same wall-clock hour as well - those forecast hours have been integrating for longer and have stepped past the noisy spin-up window, so disagreement between the two is a quiet uncertainty flag.

The reason this is the post I most want people to read is that the free tier exists for exactly this. Build the thing you wish existed for your own flying. If it stays a personal dashboard, it stays free forever. If it grows into something with users, the commercial dev tier is £39 a month and the data is the same data. Either way you start by curling one URL. The developer page has a quickstart and the API reference has every field - go build something small and tell me what breaks.