There are two things most of us want to know on a daily basis—the weather, and what time it is. [Guitarman9119] built a single device that can provide both pieces of information with a pleasingly nerdy aesthetic.
The heart of the build is a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which is proudly displayed on the front panel of the device. It’s responsible for driving the array of LEDs that display the time in hours, minutes, and seconds in binary format. The Pi Pico W uses its wireless connection to query the WorldTime API and an IP geolocation server. This provides the local date and time, and the location is then used to query the OpenWeather service for current weather information. The weather information is thankfully not displayed in binary format, because that would be straining to read. Instead, it’s displayed in human-readable format on a small OLED display.
There’s something about the way this is built—the discrete LEDs, that weird blue color that seemed to disappear by 1984—that gives this a wonderfully old school charm. You could imagine it turning up in a college lab full of old blinkenlights gear. Video after the break.
Now all I need is the local traffic report and I’m set.
Also, the blue color reminds me of blue-colored pool noodles.
Pool noodles -that’s rather specific! From past poolside trauma? lol. I’m a bit irritated that 3D printer is used at all. The project would require very little wood or woodworking skills, or one could even use a small cardboard box. The angle of the front panel might be a little harder to hack with cardboard, but this does look like a case of highly gratuitous printing! And why not use the LEDs for something weather related? To show windspeed or humidity or something. A binary clock I’d argue is nearly pure blinkenlights for the sake of blinkenlights, but weather is useful information rather than just decorative. This is definitely a “No-effort-November” project(from design pov), and might even attract low-effort trolls! I think I see one already!
I don’t need a computer for that: 1: the weather is what you experience when you step outside (and you can get a preview through your windows). 2: the current time is now.
It’s BCD (binary coded decimal).
The link for the board at JLPCB is dead.