Wet Country Wireless; How The British Weather Killed A Billion Pound Tech Company

March 29, 2021 by Jenny List 51 Comments

A dingy and cold early February in a small British town during a pandemic lockdown is not the nicest time and place to take your exercise, but for me it has revived a forgotten memory and an interesting tale of a technology that promised a lot but delivered little. Walking through an early-1990s housing development that sprawled across the side of a hill, I noticed a couple of houses with odd antennas. Alongside the usual UHF Yagis for TV reception were small encapsulated microwave arrays about the size of a biscuit tin. Any unusual antenna piques my interest but in this case, though they are certainly unusual, I knew immediately what they were. What’s more, a much younger me really wanted one, and only didn’t sign up because their service wasn’t available where I lived.

All The Promise…

Ionica was a product of Cambridge University’s enterprise incubator, formed at the start of the 1990s with the aim of being the first to provide an effective alternative to the monopolistic British Telecom in the local loop. Which is to say that in the UK at the time the only way to get a home telephone line was to go through BT because they owned all the telephone wires, and it was Ionica’s plan to change all that by supplying home telephone services via microwave links.

Their offering would be cheaper than BT’s at the socket because no cable infrastructure would be required, and they would aim to beat the monopoly on call costs too. For a few years in the mid 1990s they were the darling of the UK tech investment world, with a cutting edge prestige office building just outside Cambridge, and TV adverts to garner interest in their product. The service launched in a few British towns and cities, and then almost overnight they found themselves in financial trouble and were gone. After their demise at the end of 1998 the service was continued for a short while, but by the end of the decade it was all over. Just what exactly happened?

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Supersized Weather Station Uses Antique Analog Meters

March 10, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

For most of us, getting weather information is as trivial as unlocking a smartphone or turning on a computer and pointing an app or browser at one’s weather site of choice. This is all well and good, but it lacks a certain panache that old weather stations had with their analog dials and stained wood cases. The weather station that [BuildComics] created marries both this antique aesthetic with modern weather data availability, and then dials it up a notch for this enormous analog weather station build.

The weather station uses 16 discrete dials, each modified with a different label for the specific type of data displayed. Some of them needed new glass, and others also needed coils to be modified to be driven with a lower current than they were designed as well, since each would be driven by one of two Arduinos in this project. Each are tied to a microcontroller output via a potentiometer which controls the needle’s position for the wildly different designs of meter. The microcontrollers themselves get weather information from a combination of real-world sensors outside the home of [BuildComics] and from the internet, which allows for about as up-to-date information about the weather as one could gather first-hand.

The amount of customization of these old meters is impressive, and what’s even more impressive is the project’s final weight. [BuildComics] reports that it took two people just to lift it onto the wall mount, which is not surprising given the amount of iron in some of these old analog meters. And, although not as common in the real world anymore, these old antique meters have plenty of repurposed uses beyond weather stations as well.

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Wireless, Low Power E-Ink Weather Gadget

March 2, 2021 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

Not that long ago, making a low-power and wireless weather display complete with an e-ink screen would have required a lot of work and almost certainly would have been larger than the device [Dmitry] created.

(1) Weather alert indicator, (2) Current temperature, (3) Humidity and wind, (4) 24-hour temperature graph, (5) 24-hour precipitation probably graph

His low power e-ink weather gadget takes advantage of one of the niftier developer boards out there to create a useful and slim device that does exactly what he needs and not a lick more. It’s fast to look up weather online, but not as fast as glancing at a display in a convenient location.

The board [Dmitry] selected is a LilyGO TTGO T5s, an ESP32-based board that integrates an e-ink display, which requires no power unless being updated. It has been loaded with just enough smarts to fetch weather information using the OpenWeather API, and update the display accordingly.

Powering up the WiFi to fetch an easily-parsed JSON file and update the display only once per hour means that a battery can provide months of runtime. As a bonus, the LilyGO board even includes the ability to charge the battery, making things awfully convenient.

The bill of materials is here and code for the device, including setup directions, is on the project’s GitHub repository. And if your tastes happen to run more towards the artistic than utilitarian, we have just the weather display for you.

Weather Note Tells You What You Need To Know, And No More

December 20, 2020 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

Smartphones are portals to an overwhelming torrent of information. Yes, they’re a great way to find out the time, your bus schedule, and the weather, but they’re also full of buzzers and bells going off every three minutes to remind you that your uncle has reposted a photo of the fish he caught ten years ago. Sometimes, it’s better to display just the essentials, and that’s what Weather Note does.

It’s built around the Adafruit Feather Huzzah, a devboard built around the venerable ESP8266. It’s a great base for an Internet of Things project like this one, with WiFi built-in and ready to go. The Weather Note talks to a variety of online platforms to scrape weather data and helpful reminders, with the assistance of If This Then That, or IFTTT. Reminders to walk the dog or get some milk are displayed on a small OLED screen, while there’s also a bunch of alphanumeric displays for other information. WS2812 LEDs are used behind a shadowbox to display weather conditions, with cute cloud, rain, and sun icons. It’s all wrapped up in a tidy frame perfect for the mantlepiece or breakfast table.

It’s a great build to learn about programming for the Internet of Things, and with those bright LED displays, it’s probably a viable nightlight too. It’s a rare project that can both tell you about the weather and keep you from stubbing your toe in the kitchen, after all. Those desiring a stealthier build should consider going down the smart mirror route instead. Video after the break.

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Templateize Your Timetable With EPaper Templates

December 2, 2020 by Kerry Scharfglass 17 Comments

To date, e-paper technology has been great for two things, displaying static black and white text and luring hackers with the promise of a display that is easy on the eyes and runs forever. But poor availability of bare panels has made the second (we would say more important) goal slow to materialize. One of the first projects that comes to mind is using such a display to show ambient information like a daily summary weather, train schedules, and calendar appointments. Usually this means rolling your own software stack, but [Christopher Mullins] has put together a shockingly complete toolset for designing and updating such parameterized displays called epaper_templates.

To get it out of the way first, there is no hardware component to epaper_templates. It presupposes you have an ESP32 and a display chosen from a certain list of supported models. A quick search on our favorite import site turned up a wide variety of options for bare panels and prebuilt devices (ESP32 and display, plus other goodies) starting at around $40 USD, so this should be a low threshold to cross.

Once you have the device, epaper_templates provides the magic. [Christopher]’s key insight is that an ambient display is typically composed of groups of semi-static data displayed in a layout that never changes. The only variation is updates to the data which is fully parameterized: temperature is always integer Fahrenheit, train schedules are lists of minutes and hours, etc. Layouts like this aren’t difficult to make, but require the developer to reimplement lots of boilerplate. To make them easy to generate, epaper_templates provides a fully featured web UI to let the user freely customize a layout, then exports it as JSON which the device consumes.

The sample layout configured in the video below

The web UI is shockingly capable, especially for by the standards of the embedded web. (Remember it’s hosted on the ESP32 itself!) The user can place text and configure fonts and styles. Once placed, the text can be set to static strings or tied to variables, and if the string is a timestamp it can be formatted with a standard strftime format string.

To round out the feature set, the user can place images and lines to divide the display. Once the display is described, everything becomes simple to programmatically update. The ESP can be configured to subscribe to certain MQTT topics from which it will receive updates, or if that is too much infrastructure there is a handy REST API which accepts JSON objects containing variables or bitmaps to update on device.

We’re totally blown away by the level of functionality in epaper_templates! Check out the repo for more detail about its capabilities. For a full demo which walks through configuration of a UI with train arrival times, weather, both instant temperature and forecast with icons, and date/time check out the video after the break. Source for the example is here, but be sure to check out examples/ in the repo for more examples.

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TTGO ESP32 Module With Multiple Personalities

October 19, 2020 by Chris Lott 15 Comments

Volos Projects educator [Danko Bertović] had a TTGO ESP32 board looking for a project, so he implemented a surprisingly functional weather station for such a small screen. Presumably that was too boring for him, so he decided to write a version of the classic Atari game Breakout instead. [Danko] prefers using the Arduino IDE for ESP32 projects, and has made the Breakout software available as an Arduino sketch. We hope the weather station sketch will be released soon, too. The TTGO is a small ESP32 board with an ST7789V 1.14 in (29 mm) TFT color display, available from your favorite Shenzhen market supplier. This platform is perfect for all kinds of niche applications. We’d love to hear how you are using, or plan to use, these modules in your projects.

We wrote about one such project last summer, where a similar TTGO module was used to display 50-year broadcast delayed transcripts of the Apollo 11 mission. [Danko] is no stranger to Hackaday — he has made several Arduino-based calculator projects. Perhaps the most remarkable being the circuit sculpture binary number calculator from last year, another project that morphed into a computer game (Pong).

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Weather Warnings And Dust Detection From This Meteorological Marvel

September 14, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 4 Comments

We love getting our weather in a flurry of different methods, but have you tried building your own sensor suite to harvest the data for you? [Giovanni ‘CyB3rn0id’ Bernardo] needed to monitor isolated locations outside the reach of WiFi. His ray of hope is an ESP32 controller coupled with a LoRa module to beam data to a remote station that can access the cloud.

In addition to radios, he poured a deluge of sensors into the base station to read the temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and fine dust. Why monitor dust as part of weather data collection? Particulate matter has a huge effect on air quality, something of great interest during a respiratory pandemic. For those readers near wildfires, quantifying your air quality (both indoors and out) is certainly of interest. [Giovanni] is using an SDS011 air quality sensor and has a long writeup just on this part. It uses a fan to move air past a laser-based sensing mechanism.

At the base station, live readings are shown on an OLED screen, but you can also connect to the ESP32 through your phone like a hotspot. If you keep a memory card installed, it will cache the readings in a perpetually-updated CSV file. In regular operation, the LoRa module overcasts the telemetry to its sister unit that acts as a Wifi/LoRa bridge so anyone can view gauges and graphs in real-time on ThingSpeak.

We want to shower [CyB3rn0id] with praise for seeing the ~~cirrus~~ serious impact of harmful dust and making something that can alert people. We don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but sometimes it is better to stay inside.