Representing the weather on an LED lamp in a manner that’s easy to interpret can be difficult, but [Gosse Adema]’s weather/matrix lamp makes it not only obvious what the weather is but also offers a very attractive display. For rain, drops of light move downward, and for wind, sideways. The temperature is shown using a range of colors from red to blue, and since he is situated in the Netherlands he needed snow, which he shows as white. A rainy, windy day has lights moving both down and sideways with temperature information as the background.
To implement it he mounted LED strips inside a 3D printed cylinder with reflectors for each LED, all of which fitted into a glass cylinder taken from another lamp purchased online. The brains of it is a Raspberry Pi Zero W housed in the bottom along with a fan. Both the LEDs and the fan are controlled by the Pi. He took a lot of care with power management, first calculating the current that the LEDs would draw, and then writing Python code to limit that draw. However upon measurement, the current draw was much lower than expected and so he resized the power supply appropriately. He also took care to correctly size the wires and properly distribute the power with a specially made power distribution board. Overall, we really like the thorough job he’s done.
But then again, what’s not to like about [Gosse]’s projects. In the area of lighting, he’s dazzled us with WiFi controlled Christmas tree ornaments, but he’s also delighted us with a Prusa i3 based LEGO 3D printer on which he printed LEGO parts and then made a special extruder for printing chocolate.
Great project!
…and in my twisted sense of style great example why some things are better to stay analog ;)
+1 … about the analog bit!!!
How could anyone compare the two is a mystery.
Lest make it +1 once more!
I’ll bet you can’t use this as a random number source however. :-)
or can you? :) https://i.stack.imgur.com/wBJ7a.jpg
Let’s put it that way… if you use that random number generator, I will not buy a TLS certificate signed by you.
at first I thought “if you want to know what the weather is like – get up and look out of the window!”
But obviously, reading the original instructable, this “weather lamp” is more of a weather-forecast-display than a simple “if I got up now and looked out of the window, would I see rain?”-device. The article could have reflected on that a bit better, I think.
I do like the idea of converting numeric information (weather data) into color/motion, even if the outcome of this specific lamp isn’t my “style”. Makes me think about alternatives. Thinking is good.
I don’t know how old you are, Steve, but this lamp has nothing (nothing!) on the organic appearance of a lava lamp. It’s neat and does a thing, yes, but precisely because that thing is not what a lava lamp does, your claim makes no sense.
/Get off my lawn rant end.
Dear Klaymen, you may not see the tonal and aesthetical semblances with a lava lamp, as your eyes are just slits made into the fabric of the world!
#willsomeonesaysomethingabouttheprojectitself
Repetitive +1 :)
Just give me NWS hi def looping radar, I can make the calls. It’s like watching the game instead of listening to a poetry reading or dance of the game. When it comes to the stuff hits the fan weather, I want to know when to duck and when to watch and warn for everyone else.
That’s around a 100W of WS2812s in a space with not a lot of airflow. Even limiting the power in software I wouldn’t expect those LEDs to have a very long life time.
Lifetime reduction from heat might be a valid concern for some extremely poorly engineered designs.
It’s not a valid concern if you read the fine article.
This is an incredible build.
Now that is an informative and extensive writeup in that link, can’t complain about documentation it seems.
i am doing the similar project when i am trying i don’t find weather underground api and then after i am using openweathermap api but i am unable to get the all the animations like rain, snow ,cloud and wind please any one tell me how to implement these in 16*16 rgb matrix