Building A Steam Punk Style Time And Weather Display

This is [Pierre Cauchois’] digital weather display. Since weather displays are ubiquitous in this day of smart phones in every pocket he went out of his way to give it a unique look. He started with a wooden voltmeter case, swapping the ancient display for a modern LCD screen.

He used Gadgeteer components for the retrofit. The images for the LCD are stored on an SD card and displayed on demand. Since the digital bezel will be the same no matter what the time or environmental conditions [Pierre] used the power of the .NET framework that drives the system. He made up an image using magenta for all of the dial openings. This way a sprite can be used just for the changing numbers, weather icon, and graphing area.

Looking at all that went into coding the project we think the Gadgeteer components are perfect for those that are well-versed in upper-level languages and don’t really want to deal with low-level microcontroller issues.

[Thanks George]

8 thoughts on “Building A Steam Punk Style Time And Weather Display

  1. I’m partial to the genre, so I enjoy seeing Steampunk builds. That said, I can’t help but cringe when I see a century-old instrument in fine condition destroyed for a project like this.

    This reminds me of a steampunk “artist” who gutted a perfectly good pair of early 1900’s high-impedance headphones, and stuffed the cans with “modern” transducers, so that she could use the headphones with her mp3 player. The irony here is that the headphones could have been left intact and made to work. (Oh… they wouldn’t have sounded good? Well, neither will a Chinese-made walkman transducer hot-glued inside of an antique headphone can.)

    Everyone has seen Jake Van Slatt’s steampunk work. He’s built a lot of beautiful and convincing steampunk gear, and he makes a great deal of use of re-purposed rubbish and castoffs in his designs. That said, I don’t believe that he has made a practice of destroying antiques.

    I’m not criticizing the builder, he can do with his property as he wishes (and he did build something very nice.) I’m just voicing my own aesthetic sensibilities on manner.

    1. although i partailly agree, for me it’s all in the meter’s guts itself… to be able to see how such a thing is made from back then, he could donate the working guts (the meter) to a museum for display OF device or functional display device :)

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