Displaying Weather on a 32x16 LED Matrix | Hacker News Reader

Displaying Weather on a 32x16 LED Matrix

medium.com

41 pointscheerio11 comments

Oh cool, 'weather widgets' are a fun first project for small screens and LED displays.

I like showing people how to hook up ESP8266s to the OpenWeatherMap API[1] - it's a quick and useful example and it seems to get people thinking about home automation. One fun way to display the results very cheaply is to use just a few of those colored LEDs for things like temperature ('blue->yellow->red') and conditions (yellow for sunny, grey for overcast, blue for rain, etc.)

[1]: https://openweathermap.org/api

By "west coast" OP probably means CA. Despite popular belief there are other states on the west coast of North America. The weather in OR, WA and AK is much more variable.

Until this weekend, the weather in OR has unvariably been: rain. It'll probably be back to that by the end of the week.

I once considered doing a project similar to this one, using an esp8266, but decided against it since it would be too depressing.

Well, definitely CA:

> Additionally, since it rains so rarely, if it’s going to rain, people are usually talking about it at least a day in advance.

Was odd that such prevalence was placed on the coasts by the author.

> On the East coast you can be caught off guard by rain, snow, or really cold, windy weather. I’ve been caught a few times in the bad weather, to the point where I’ve started looking up the weather forecast before leaving the house.

It's pretty humorous to read this perspective. The west coast must truly be as fantastic as advertised.

> how do you debug hardware? One way is by using a multimeter.

> A friend at the Recurse Center let me borrow Saleae’s logic analyzer

Phew! Multimeter is not the way to go unless you really have no other option.

Are there any good low cost logic analyzers you know of?

I've never had a big enough, or time dependent enough project to require anything more than a multimeter and patience, so I've not put the cash forward for a logic analyzer, or oscilloscope, or whatever. Not entirely sure what the difference is anyways...

If you want to go for lowest cost possible, you can find tons of cheap hardware on AliExpress (search for "8ch logic analyzer", they go around 10 bucks).

While these vendors usually just tell you to use Saleae's software, you can and should use the awesome open-source Sigrok (https://sigrok.org) tool, which supports these knockoff clones!

$10 is my kind of price! Thanks, I'll look into it. Now to find a project to test it with...

I picked up one of those aliexpress "Saleae logic analyzers" a while back. It's obviously a knock-off, but it works really well, though I've never tried to use it at its advertised max supported frequency (2MHz), most of the stuff I do is < 1MHz.

Oh, wow! Great tip. I found some vendors on Amazon selling the same thing for £10, which I guess is enough of a markup to make it worth it for the vendor, while still being crazy cheap to buy. Totally getting one of these.

I'd love to see the same thing done with an Arduino Mega and a wi-fi shield. It would be a much cleaner build since most arduino boards are 5V standard.

But then I'm sure you'd pay for it in the hairiness of the aruduino/led board interface, haha.

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