Weather 3.12.1

Simple 8x8 hour-ahead weather forecast gadget based on the Electric Imp Platform.

Hardware

Ingredients

• 1x Electric Imp Developer Kit
• 1x Adafruit 1.2in 8x8 LED Matrix + I²C Backpack
• 4x short female-to-female connector wires

Assembly

1. Assemble the Adafruit display and backpack
2. Solder connector pins to the Electric Imp April breakout board. I used right-angle pins so that the connectors are parallel to the breakout board.
3. Slot the imp001 card into the breakout board
4. Use the connector wires as per the table below

April Pin	Matrix Pin
GND	-
3V3	+
Pin8	SCL
Pin9	SDA

Cloning this Repository

This repo pulls in some dependencies through git submodules. Use this command to clone the repo and get the libraries on which it depends:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/smittytone/Weather.git

Setup

1. Visit Electric Imp to sign up for a free developer account. You will be asked to confirm your email address.

2. Visit Electric Imp’s Getting Started Guide to learn how to configure your imp001 to access your local WiFi network, and how to enter code into the IDE and run it on your device.

3. Visit Google’s geolocation API site to obtain an API key. This is used to calculate your Weather unit’s physical location.

4. Get a Dark Sky API Key, which you can obtain here. The Dark Sky API is a commercial service, but the first 1000 API calls made under your API key each day are free of charge. However, subsequent calls are billed at a rate of $0.0001 per call. The code posts a tally to the device log, and you can make use of its IFTTT integration to receive an email if your device is getting close to the limit.

5. Get an IFTTT account, which you can obtain here. Weather instantiates an instance of Electric Imp’s IFTTT library in order to post a notification to IFFTT when your Dark Sky call tally approaches the limit of daily free calls (950 out of 1000). At IFTTT, create an applet that responds to the event "darksky_warning" by sending an email. The current tally and the maximum allowed are sent as the value1, value2 and value3 which the applet’s email action adds to the body of the email. The applet follows the path:

   If maker Event "darksky_warning", then send me an email at <your registered email address>

6. Add these API keys to the agent code in the appropriate section.

7. Cut and paste the Location library code into both the agent and the device code — paste to replace the appropriate #import statement.

8. Cut and paste the HT16K33Matrix library code into the device code — paste to replace the appropriate #import statement.

If you are using the macOS tool Squinter (download here) to manage your Electric Imp projects, the device code is set up to import and pre-process these files. You may need to change the #import statements to reflect the location of the libraries on your machine. Alternatively, you can simply paste in the contents of each file over the respective #import statement.

Control UI

The Weather Monitor has its own, web-based control UI, accessed at the agent URL.

Release Notes

• 3.12.1 28 January 2021
  • Use submodules for certain dependencies.
  • Update to Rocky 3.0.1.
• 3.12.0 06 August 2020
  • Persist device location; never check again unless device reset or user requests location update via UI.
    • This is it minimize Google charges.
  • CSS improvements.
• 3.11.9 21 May 2020
  • Update JQuery to 3.5.x.
  • Update Bootstrap to 4.5.x.
• 3.11.8 26 February 2020
  • Support HT16K33Matrix 3.0.0.
• 3.11.7 18 December 2019
  • Support Rocky 3.0.0.
• 3.11.6 5 September 2019
  • Update Jquery to 3.4.1, Boostrap to 4.3.1, Bootmessage to 2.2.2
  • Add CrashReporter 1.0.1, Simpleslack 1.0.1
• 3.11.5 18 April 2019
  • Update JQuery to 3.4.0
• 3.11.4 28 March 2019
  • Update dependencies:
    • DarkSky library
    • Location 1.5.3
• 3.11.3 15 February 2019
  • Minor agent code changes
• 3.11.2 12 February 2019
  • Improve Web UI CSS for small screen sizes
  • Update dependencies (Bootstrap 4.3.0)
• 3.11.1 7 February 2019
  • Adjust temperature data type and display precision
• 3.11.0 31 January 2019
  • Add inverse video option
  • Remove Restart button (largely redundant now)
  • Apply weather icons as LED matrix user-definable characters
• 3.10.1 1 November 2018
  • Update dependencies
• 3.10.0 27 September 2018
  • Add control to set the forecast display repeat period
  • Stop DarkSky requests busting the limit
• 3.9.0 30 July 2018
  • Add DisconnectionManager 2.0.0
  • Add a periodic repeat of the current forecast on the display, enabled or disabled via the web UI
• 3.8.0 8 June 2018
  • Update Web UI to be based on Bootstrap 4.1.1
  • Separate out Web UI into own file for clarity
  • Add support for serial logging
  • Update dependencies, including JQuery 3.3.1
  • Prevent Ajax XHR caching
  • Support polite deployment

Licence

The Weather design and software is copyright © 2021 Tony Smith and made available under the MIT Licence.