Designed with a 3.5" 480x320 TFT display in mind
| Daily forecast | Hourly forecast | Info screen |
|---|---|---|
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PiWeatherRock is an internet-connected weather station. Its purpose is to display local weather condtions. It was created with the goal of having a simple way to check the weather before taking our dogs out for a walk. The end result is a modern version of a weather rock.
Right now all data is pulled from Dark Sky. A future interation will also incorporate data from sensors connected to a battery powered Arduino.
Note: A previous version pulled data from Weather Underground. IBM bought Weather Undergrund and decided they were too cool to continue to let developers use their api at all for free. To quote their site as of 2018-09-03:
To improve our services and enhance our relationship with our users, we will no longer provide free weather API keys as part of our program.
I cannot wrap my head around how this is supposed to "enhance our relationship with our users."
The first thing you need to do to run this applicaiton is go to
https://darksky.net/dev and get an API key. You can make up to 1,000 API calls
per day without paying or even providing payment info. After getting a key,
copy config.py.sample to config.py and fill in values for your setup. In
addition to your API key you will also need your latitude and longitude.
https://gps-coordinates.org/ seems to work well for this as do some cell phone
apps.
Once you have your config file in place, you will need to install dependencies.
Note: Anywhere you see pip or python you should be able to substitute the
Python 3 versions without issue (aka pip3 and python3).
sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev \
libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libjpeg-dev libportmidi-dev libtimedate-perl
pip install -r requirements.txtNow you should be able to run python weather.py to start the program. While
its running there are some keyboard shortcuts to see additional information:
- w: Displays the main weather screen
- i: Displays an info screen which contains some additiional info information
- q: Quits the program
- The buld of this project originated with the code written by Jim Kemp and published at http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-Internet-Weather-Station/.
- Jim Kemp's version pulled from weather.com via pywapi but that doesn't seem seem to work any longer. This project now pulls from Weather Underground.
- Some ideas were also taken from https://github.com/sarnold/pitft-weather-display.
Almost all the icons have been replaced with ones from github.com/manifestinteractive/weather-underground-icons.
Some additional icons come from
erikflowers.github.io/weather-icons.
These have been converted to png files via the
icons/alt_icons/generate-dark-sky-pngs.sh script in this repository. To use
the script you will need to first run pip3 install cairosvg.
Pulled GPIOmock.py from github.com/grantwinney/52-Weeks-of-Pi to enable testing in an x86 virtual machine.