Drops forecasts, lightning, the home-screen widget and advertising. What remains is radar on a map, the official ARPA alert bulletin, and rain notifications. The base map is now OpenFreeMap's Positron style: real OpenStreetMap vector tiles with no API key, no registration, no request limits and commercial use permitted. Every other free tier — MapTiler, Stadia, Jawg, Thunderforest — needs a key, which is a secret to manage, a quota to outgrow and a signup to complete before anyone can build the project, and the map is the one thing the app cannot work without. Positron rather than Liberty or Bright because the radar overlay has to be the loudest thing on screen, and a desaturated grey base is built to sit under data. Its style JSON carries no `attribution` field, so MapLibre displays no credits by itself. The app renders them from the region config instead: the two mandatory credits, OpenStreetMap and OpenMapTiles, go in the always-visible bar, and OpenFreeMap's own credit — optional by their terms — is listed on the Sources screen with the rest. The bundled offline style is still reachable with MAP_STYLE_URL=offline, and still claims no base map attribution, because crediting OpenStreetMap while showing it would be a false claim. Radar-DPC stays the source. ARPA Piemonte's own radar remains a disabled stub for two reasons that belong to the project owner, not to the code: the real-time access link is only issued by email, and the open-data page states the data is "gratuiti" and nothing else. Free of charge is not a licence, and rendering those volumes into frames served from a CDN is redistribution. Both questions go in the same email. An earlier draft of the docs recorded ARPA radar as CC BY 4.0; the source page does not support that, so the claim is removed rather than carried forward. The documentation is updated throughout rather than annotated: CLAUDE.md gains an explicit scope boundary, data-sources drops MET Norway and ISTAT and gains the base map, licenses records that free of charge is not a licence, privacy loses the whole advertising section, and the roadmap is renumbered so the backend worker is next — until it exists, DpcRadarSource has nothing to read. licenses.md keeps Open-Meteo and Blitzortung listed as excluded even though the features that would have used them are gone: both are non-commercial-only, ads are a plausible future, and neither should be adopted on the grounds that there are none today. Verified: analyze clean, 130 tests passing, and on the emulator the radar overlay sits correctly over Piedmont on real OSM tiles with Turin, Milan and Genoa labelled, the age reads "Aggiornato 4 minuti fa", and the Sources screen lists all five credits with their licences. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Nuvolari
Precipitation radar for Piedmont, Italy. Android first, iOS later, one Flutter codebase.
Radar imagery comes from the public Radar-DPC platform and weather alerts from the ARPA Piemonte XML-CAP bulletin, drawn over an OpenStreetMap base map. The app is free, with no advertising and no accounts.
Scope: radar, official alerts, rain notifications. No forecasts, no lightning, no home-screen widget. See CLAUDE.md.
Nuvolari is an independent app. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by ARPA Piemonte or the Dipartimento della Protezione Civile. For civil-protection purposes the official channels always prevail.
Layout
app/ Flutter application (Dart package "nuvolari")
backend/ Python worker: fetches DPC rasters, crops, reprojects, renders PNG frames
docs/ architecture, data sources, licenses, stack decisions, roadmap, privacy
tool/ verification scripts
Start with docs/architecture.md, then docs/roadmap.md for what is built and what is next.
Toolchain
| Tool | Version |
|---|---|
| Flutter | 3.47.3 stable (Dart 3.13.3) |
| Android SDK | platform 36, build-tools 36.0.0, platform-tools |
| JDK | 21 |
| Python | 3.12+ (3.14 works; rasterio ships wheels for it) |
| Android NDK | 28.2.13676358 — pinned by maplibre_gl, not by this project |
A full toolchain plus a warm Gradle cache needs roughly 14 GB of disk: Flutter
3 GB, Android SDK 2.5 GB (2 GB of which is the NDK the map plugin pins), the Gradle
cache 5 GB, and build output around 2 GB. flutter clean reclaims the last of those.
Configuration
Secrets never enter the repository. Copy the template and fill it in:
cp env.example.json env.json # env.json is git-ignored
| Key | Purpose |
|---|---|
MAP_STYLE_URL |
MapLibre style URL. Empty uses the free OpenFreeMap style; offline forces the bundled no-network style. |
RADAR_MANIFEST_URL |
Base URL of the published manifest.json. |
RADAR_SOURCE |
mock (offline demo), dpc (live), arpa (disabled stub). |
REGION_ID |
Which region config to load. Defaults to piemonte. |
Running
cd app
flutter run --dart-define-from-file=../env.json
With no env.json the app starts in demo mode: mock radar frames from assets on the
free OpenFreeMap base map. No credentials are needed for anything — OpenFreeMap has
no API key and no signup.
The radar frames work with no network at all. The base map needs one; run with
--dart-define=MAP_STYLE_URL=offline to drop it too and work entirely offline.
Debugging in VS Code
Open the Nuvolari folder as the workspace root — the configurations in
.vscode/ are relative to it. Then pick one in Run and Debug and press F5:
| Configuration | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Nuvolari — debug (emulatore) | Everyday work. Demo mode, no env.json needed, hot reload on save. |
| Nuvolari — profile | Judging animation smoothness. Debug builds run the Dart VM unoptimised, so the radar timeline always looks worse than it is — never assess it in debug. |
| Nuvolari — debug con env.json | Pointing the app at a live radar manifest or a different base map style. |
| Nuvolari — debug su Windows | Fast UI iteration with no emulator. The native map does not render here. |
| Test — tutti / Test — file corrente | Debugging tests with breakpoints. |
Every emulator configuration runs tool/start_emulator.ps1 first, so F5 works from a
cold machine. The script exits immediately when a device is already attached, so
pressing F5 twice does not start two emulators.
Ctrl+Shift+B runs the full verification. Other tasks live under
Terminal → Run Task: quick verification, regenerating the demo radar frames, and
shutting the emulator down.
Verifying
.\tool\verify.ps1 # format, analyze, test, build, lint, pytest
.\tool\verify.ps1 -SkipBuild # fast inner loop
Stages whose target does not exist yet are skipped, so this runs from day one.
Attribution
Radar-DPC (CC BY-SA) · Arpa Piemonte · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · © OpenMapTiles · OpenFreeMap.
See docs/licenses.md for the obligations these carry — in
particular, the rendered radar frames are a derived product of CC BY-SA data and inherit
share-alike, and the OpenFreeMap style ships no attribution field, so the app has to
render the map credits itself.