A home weather station is great geek street cred. Buying a commercially available station will get you all the bells and whistles, but the look tends to the utilitarian. And then there’s the trouble of placing the sensor array somewhere. To solve both problems, [GradyHillhouse] built this unique weather station with analog meters.
Based on a Particle Photon pulling weather data from the forecast.io API, values for temperature, pressure and the like are sent to analog IO pins. Each pin has a meter with a trimmer pot for calibration and a custom printed label. There’s also a digital output that goes high when a severe weather alert is posted; that drives an LED behind the bezel of one of the meters. Everything is mounted in a walnut plaque which makes for a nice presentation. The video after the break details the build.
As you can imagine, we’ve featured lots of weather stations before. Some display their data on a screen, some in more unique ways. But we really like the old school look and simplicity of this project.
[via reddit]
Next step is a proximity detector and a “swing” algorithm. Needles stay at zero (to save power) until you get close enough to read the dials. Then the needles float up, past and then gently settle down on the appropriate values.
really nice build, love these kind of dials. They can be given some personality by occasionally bouncing about or sweeping from 0-max in sequence!
That was a really well made video, but the cold solder joint at 3:31 made me shudder.
Yikes, you weren’t kidding.
Haha I went back and fixed that. I had given up at the time because the heat shrink shrunk to soon.
The nice part is you can do this with other more open modules just as easy and skip the cloud based shackles.
*facepalm*
The internet of things is not things polling the internet. It’s things providing data BACK.
he data from the internet of things needs to be visualized…this does this quite nicely.
So you propose we upload data and never use it?
I’m so with you. This is a weather data display.
In my universe a weather station at least acquires some local data. Air pressure would be helpful to get a local forecast.
Actually that’s not true. IoT actually has a formal definition from the International Telecommunication Union which categorically includes objects which “exchange data.” (see: http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/recommendations/rec.aspx?rec=y.2060).
Dan, thanks for posting my project. Pumped to have my second project posted on Hackaday. If anyone has questions about the project, feel free to leave a comment on the youtube video or open an issue in github. If you have comments about my soldering skills, you can forward them to my hotmail address from middle school.
The use of analogue instruments (or a depiction of them) still makes sense to get an idea if a value is on the higher or lower side of the expected average. Digits can’t really tell you, unless you know their meaning and frame of reference. I like this project.
Lovely tech & design!
What is the CAD package you used to create the panel meter faces ?