Weathergotchi – an E-Paper Climate Logger | Hacker News Reader

Weathergotchi – an E-Paper Climate Logger

github.com

121 pointsluanmuniz28 comments

The YouTube video [0] is quite funny, I like when someone doesn't take themselves too seriously.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I44iGj7gLGA

I have no idea what he's talking about most of the time but I can't stop watching.

Ouch, shade on the SensorPush. I had 2 and I got 2 more. It requires an app, but they're quite well made imho.

But yes, open source would be better. If physical portability is not a requirement, Xiaomi hygrometer 2 with this custom firmware https://github.com/atc1441/atc_MiThermometer is quite excellent

Andrew Quitmeyer doesn't take himself very seriously, but dogs take him VERY seriously.

Mark Your Territory - Check Into Foursquare by Peeing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRdfeb7vDWg

https://github.com/quitmeyer/Mark-Your-Territory---Pee-to-Ch...

https://www.instructables.com/Pee-to-Check-In-to-Foursquare-...

https://popupcity.net/insights/pee-to-check-in-to-foursquare...

He does it all: the YouTube face, the math floating around, non-working greenscreen, some memes and then he goes camping (including a Blair Witch style run through the snow). This is so brilliant.

I’ve been wanting to do some projects like this from the software side. I want an e-ink display + ESP32 inside a case. But I don’t want to do that myself for the nth time as it doesn’t feel novel or interesting. Is there any decent hardware option that begins fully open?

Also: If I take very good care of my Weathergotchi, do I get to change the weather?

M5Stack has black & white (https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-esp32-core-ink-dev...) and color (https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-color-esp32s3-dev-...) development kits that look like exactly what you're looking for.

This looks exactly like what I’m seeking! Thank you.

Adafruit has a pretty cool esp32 based board with a circular touchscreen and dial

Here's one that I just ordered myself: https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-s3-epaper-1.54.htm

temperature, humidity, audio in AND out!!!

I get the weather- part, but I don't get the -gotchi part... Do you have to keep the device alive by... seeing new types of weather?

I think it's evoking "this little smiley face guy on a small monochrome screen", and not implying interactivity.

It's dumb anyway. Iirc the -gotchi part comes from the Japanese transliteration of the english word "watch". Unless your program's a pocket watch of some kind as well as a virtual pet, it's just a tama

Uotchi is the Japanese word for watch. Tamago (egg) and Uotchi (watch) - so here they're implying "Weather Watch", it should probably be Weatherotchi or something, but still works fine imo. Korea and Japan love smashing words together to make new words, for example in Korea "Chimaek" is Chikin (치킨 - fried chicken) + Maekju (맥주 - beer), something Koreans often ask if you'd like to go out for.

This is charming. E-paper is such a good fit for ambient data like this — always visible, no glow, basically no power. How often do you refresh the display, and does partial refresh ghosting become a problem over time?

While I'm not sure about the exact e-paper panel model used in this project, in my experience with these small e-paper screens, a full refresh is pretty much mandatory every 10 or so partial refreshes—which is significantly worse than Kindle-level performance. Just about every screen I've worked with suffers from some level of ghosting, and it definitely gets noticeably worse in higher temperatures during the summer. Plus, these cheaper e-paper displays tend to degrade quite fast—after a couple of years, the aging becomes painfully obvious.

I found some kind weather sensor like this in a creek in a sealed clear film canister-sized container.

I took it home and looked up the part number. Looks like it was probably part of a network of sensors monitoring the forest health, but some ziptie broke on this one and ended up starting to get washed away. It ran on a big watch battery. I didn't try to get the data off it.. don't recall how data access worked for it.

As opposed to the climategotchi, which just shows a dead guy on fire.

I see the antenna points straight at ground and buttons. Is the wifi ok?

It does not use wifi or Bluetooth.

In the video he does "joke" about using BT for an app

But yet, on the github page it explicitly says it does not use Wifi or BT.

Other comment says no wifi but even if it did, those antennas don't radiate in a straight line

Cool. What about porting this to pwnagotchi, then?

This doesn’t look as fun as a Tamagotchi.

Calling this a tamagotchi is silly. The only thing this and tamagotchis have in common is that they’re small electronic devices with a screen (and even that tech is different).

When you compare a project to something that it isn’t, you’re doing it a disservice. The people who are intrigued by the tamagotchi angle are disappointed, while the people who are uninterested in it (but might still like the project) won’t even give it a change. Everybody loses.

It's marketing. Attach yourself to some wildly more popular brand for no reason other than to boost your own popularity. Like JavaScript did with Java.

Except the repo doesn’t mention “tamagotchi” even once. Even the “gotchi” in the name only appears once in the README.

I’m talking about the submitted title to HN.

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