The Weather

I wrote a small state machine to use with a Sparkfun ESP8266 Thing Dev that performs only ONE operation:

Fetch random weather data from the OpenWeather Api when the user hits a big red button.

(well, actually it gets the info from a custom script on my own server that connects with OpenWeather and performs all the "select a random city ID" operations, but the idea is the same).

There's more information about the project, how it works and how it started (as a stupid Slack command, by the way) on my Hackaday.io project page.

Overview

• weather.ino is the classic Arduino file with the main loop. It's a simple state machine that works from an idle state to a displaying info one (among with a couple of "connecting" and "fetching data from remote host").
• The connection is done as a regular "send request example" (check the ESP8266Wifi library page for more info). In my case I'm using a remote script to fetch a random city id from the OpenWeather API + getting the weather for that city (changing this to connect to the OpenWeather API itself should be easy - actually I did it before this and it worked without any problem).
• The remote script is not here, maybe I'll add it in the future, but it's basically a raw PHP script that connects-and-gets some data from a standard OpenWeather API endpoint.
• There's a couple of helpers (JsonHelper and ScreenHelper) that deals with the data parsing and data displaying. All the screen-related and data-related operations are there (WeatherData.h also contains a small struct to add the "interesting" data for the screen).

TODO

• Avoid the serial connection by default (used only for debugging)
• I need to improve my C and C++ skills (practise, practise!)
• Some visual improvements could be made to the display state: switching between different "views" (with different info) making a custom homemade text-scrolling system, tinkering a little bit more with the Adafruit library... As a quick and simple proof of concept this works pretty fine, sure, but maybe I'll add some extra weather data to each request.
• Use less String objects (for things like the screen control it's really useful, and since the project itself it's actually pretty small, there's no related performance issues)