The magic glowing orb that tells the future has been a popular thing to make ever since we realized we had the technology to bring it out of the fortune teller’s tent. We really like [jarek319]’s interpretation of the concept.
Sitting mystically above his umbrella stand, with a single black cord providing the needed pixies for fortune telling, a white cube plays an animation simulating the weather outside for the next six hours. If he sees falling drops, he knows to grab an umbrella before leaving the house. If he sees a thunderstorm, he knows to get the umbrella with the fiberglass core in order to prevent an intimate repeat of Mr. Franklin’s early work.
The core of the project is an ESP8226 project board of some description or another. The LEDs are a matrix of WS2812B individually addressable LEDs. He programmed it to ping OpenWeather and get the current status. After that he started writing animations for the display to loop.
The case is a box with a sheet of white acrylic over the top. The acrylic diffuses the LEDs nicely and it looks really good in the video which is after the break.
openweather link is not what you think it is Brian.
arrrgh, sorry Gerrit.
Fixed. Thanks.
“See” a thunderstorm?
Or, y’know, just ask Alexa, who, alas, has taken so much of the mystery out of life.
just look out the window
Don’t have any windows in my mom’s basement.
lol
Thanks for the feature, and sorry for the shortness of the animation! I was in a hurry to get it out the door and into the hands of the person who bought the prototype :) I’ll take a longer video of all the modes and weather patterns in the next version
Maybe he should use the Canada Life Whether Beacon system for telling the whether?
http://www.blogto.com/city/2013/08/a_brief_history_of_the_canada_life_weather_beacon/