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DriveBC smart home integration, free and open source

DriveBC integration for Gladys Assistant

Unofficial. Road events in British Columbia from DriveBC open data.

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Unofficial integration. It reads the road events that DriveBC (Province of British Columbia) publishes on its public Open511 API: closures, construction, incidents, weather and road conditions. No account, no API key.

This integration is not an official source. Before you drive, check DriveBC itself. The data may lag behind the road, and the integration may miss an event.

Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – British Columbia.

What you get​

Up to three watch zones, each one a Gladys device. A zone is a circle around a point (1 to 300 km), optionally limited to some roads ("Highway 1, Highway 99").

Each zone device has:

FeatureTypeMeaning
Events in effectcounterActive events in effect now inside the zone
Road closurescounterThose with a road marked closed
Major eventscounterThose of severity "major"
SummarytextThe events, closures first, then major ones, then by distance

The summary is written in the language chosen in the configuration (English or French); the road names and the DriveBC texts stay in English, the only language of the API.

In effect means: an active event whose schedule interval covers the current time, as given by the DriveBC server (Date header). An event planned for later is not counted until its interval starts. Daily hours written only in the description ("7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, weekdays") are not read: such an event counts for its whole interval. An event without a readable schedule, or an answer without a readable server time, counts as in effect. A server time more than a day away from the clock of Gladys is not believed (taken as unreadable).

No event: DriveBC answers a box without any event with an HTTP 500 carrying the code 1008 ("Error processing OP5 event data"), never with an empty list (observed on the live API in October 2026). The integration reads that exact answer as "no event"; any other 500 is an outage. When a zone that had events falls to "no event" through that answer, 0 is published only if the next scheduled read says the same (no extra request): one interval later. A first read, or a zone already at 0, is published at once. A list where more than half of the events cannot be read is never 0: the status says that DriveBC sends events that cannot be read, nothing is published, and the reads go on at the interval (no pause).

Scene trigger: "New DriveBC event in a zone"​

Fired when an event in effect appears in a zone for the first time and was created, updated or started within the last 2 hours (server time). Filters: zone, event types, severity. Variables: road, headline and description (English), type, severity, closed (yes/no), distance from the zone center (km), announced delay (minutes, empty when unknown), DriveBC event id.

It is not fired by the first read of a zone, nor after you move a zone (new center, radius or roads): that read only learns what is already there. It is not fired when the answer carries no readable server time. At most 20 events per zone and per read.

Configuration​

  1. Language of the summary: English or French.
  2. Read interval: 3 to 60 minutes (5 by default).
  3. Zone 1 (required), zones 2 and 3 (optional, left empty to turn them off): a name, the latitude and longitude of the center (decimal degrees, inside British Columbia), the radius in km (25 by default), and optionally the roads to keep, separated by commas, as DriveBC writes them ("Highway 1", "Highway 99"; "Hwy 99" works too; the case is ignored). Local roads are named "Other Roads" by DriveBC.

A refused field is named in the status (the value you typed is not repeated there).

The button Show the last read tells what the last read of each zone gave and when the next comes. It does not read DriveBC.

Pace and courtesy toward DriveBC​

DriveBC throttles its API and asks to space requests by 10 seconds or more. The integration:

  • sends one request at a time, 12 seconds at least between the starts of two requests (one per zone and per round; a zone with more than 500 events takes one more request per 500, up to 2000);
  • starts a round every interval, measured from the start of the previous round;
  • does not read sooner after a restart, a reconnection to Gladys, a configuration saved unchanged, a Discovery or the test button (the time of the last attempt is kept in /data, and in memory); moving a zone reads at once, 12 seconds after the last request;
  • when /data cannot tell the last attempt (unreadable file, a date in the future, a /data that cannot be written or does not answer within 2 seconds), waits 3 minutes after the start before the first read, and says so in the status; a /data that stops being writable later is said in the status too: a restart may then read sooner;
  • after a 429 ("too many requests"), pauses every read for 5 minutes, then 10, 20… up to 6 hours; after a server error (5xx, the "no event" answer apart) or another unexpected status (400, 403, 404…), for 2 minutes, then 4, 8… up to 6 hours; a Retry-After longer than that is honored, up to 6 hours. A refusal that arrives while the configuration is being saved, or Gladys reconnects, still starts the pause. The pause is kept in /data across restarts; the doubling starts over after a successful read;
  • identifies itself with the User-Agent gladys-drivebc/<version> (+https://github.com/LM1LC3N7/gladys-drivebc);
  • cuts an answer after 30 seconds or 16 MB.

DriveBC does not offer ETag nor Last-Modified on its events: every round reads the events again.

Status​

The Configuration screen shows, for each zone, the counts of the last read and its time (Pacific time), or why it failed and the time of the last data. Data older than 2 hours is said stale. When a read fails, nothing is published for that zone: the devices keep their last values and the status says since when. A fall to 0 waiting for its confirmation is said too. The integration is shown connected when the last read of at least one zone succeeded, less than 2 hours ago.

Privacy​

The coordinates of your zones stay in the Gladys configuration. DriveBC receives, for each zone, the box around the circle (its center is the middle of the box). The /data file holds the time of the last attempt, the pause, and per zone the ids of the events already seen with a salted fingerprint of the zone, not its coordinates.

Limits​

  • British Columbia only (the zone center must be in BC; events near the borders are included).
  • Tested against the real DriveBC API on 2026-10-29; not yet tested by a user in British Columbia.
  • The texts of DriveBC are in English only.
  • "No event" is the HTTP 500 with code 1008 of DriveBC: should DriveBC ever send that exact answer during an outage, a zone would show 0 after two such reads in a row (one interval apart).

Configuration settings​

These are the settings DriveBC asks for in its configuration screen in Gladys.

SettingTypeRequiredDescription
DriveBC road eventssectionNoClosures, construction, incidents and road conditions published by DriveBC (Province of British Columbia), read from its public Open511 API: no account, no key. Up to three zones, each one a device. Data in English only, under the Open Government Licence – British Columbia. Check DriveBC before you drive: this integration is not an official source.
Language of the summaryselectNoLanguage of the device names and of the summary text (DriveBC road names stay in English).
Read interval (minutes)numberNoFrom 3 to 60 minutes. DriveBC asks for at least 10 s between two requests: the zones are read one after the other, 12 s apart.
Zone 1sectionNoA circle around a point: the events in effect inside it are counted. Required.
NamestringNoName of the device in Gladys (60 characters at most).
LatitudenumberYesCenter of the zone, in British Columbia (decimal degrees).
LongitudenumberYesCenter of the zone (decimal degrees, negative: west).
Radius (km)numberNoFrom 1 to 300 km.
Only these roadsstringNoOptional: road names as DriveBC writes them, separated by commas ("Highway 1, Highway 99"; "Hwy 99" works too). Empty: every road of the zone.
Zone 2 (optional)sectionNoA circle around a point: the events in effect inside it are counted. Leave the latitude and longitude empty to turn it off.
NamestringNoName of the device in Gladys (60 characters at most).
LatitudenumberNoCenter of the zone, in British Columbia (decimal degrees).
LongitudenumberNoCenter of the zone (decimal degrees, negative: west).
Radius (km)numberNoFrom 1 to 300 km.
Only these roadsstringNoOptional: road names as DriveBC writes them, separated by commas ("Highway 1, Highway 99"; "Hwy 99" works too). Empty: every road of the zone.
Zone 3 (optional)sectionNoA circle around a point: the events in effect inside it are counted. Leave the latitude and longitude empty to turn it off.
NamestringNoName of the device in Gladys (60 characters at most).
LatitudenumberNoCenter of the zone, in British Columbia (decimal degrees).
LongitudenumberNoCenter of the zone (decimal degrees, negative: west).
Radius (km)numberNoFrom 1 to 300 km.
Only these roadsstringNoOptional: road names as DriveBC writes them, separated by commas ("Highway 1, Highway 99"; "Hwy 99" works too). Empty: every road of the zone.

How to install DriveBC in Gladys​

  1. In Gladys, open Integrations: DriveBC appears in the catalog, next to the native integrations, with a community badge.
  2. Click Install. Gladys pulls the Docker image (ghcr.io/lm1lc3n7/gladys-drivebc:0.1.1), starts it in a sandbox isolated from the core, and generates the integration's interface (devices, discovery and configuration).
  3. Open the Configuration screen of the integration, fill in the settings, and save.
  4. You can also install it directly from its repository URL: https://github.com/LM1LC3N7/gladys-drivebc.

DriveBC requires Gladys >=5.1.0. The catalog inside Gladys refreshes every hour, so a new version becomes available at most one hour after its release.

Not running Gladys yet? It is free and open source: follow the installation guide to get started.

About external integrations​

DriveBC is an external integration: a community integration packaged as a Docker container and published on GitHub, that Gladys installs in one click and runs in a sandbox isolated from its core. It is published and maintained by LM1LC3N7, not by the Gladys core team.

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