When Maker Jason Rolfe decided to take his first foray into the world of Arduino, he was attracted to the design and challenge of making a word clock. Inspired by the project. Not wanting to repeat it exactly, he realized he could have the same design, but with different input.
“In a ski/outdoor town, everyone seems to be an amateur meteorologist, so weather is always a topic of discussion,” says Rolfe. With that in mind, he decided to do his own take on the project. Creating a grid of possible temperatures and weather related icons he made this backlit display capable of showing the latest weather forecasts.
Pulling data from the Weather Underground API, the display shifts between forecasts for today, now, tomorrow, and tonight at 15 second intervals.
For Rolfe, this project had a lot of firsts. It was his first time working with Arduino and with Adafruit’s NeoPixels. It was his first time building a wooden frame. “The maker community is great and I found a lot of resources (ebooks, forums, instructables, etc.) to help me through the coding, which was the hardest part.”
As a new take on an old idea, this project is a very cool riff on a word clock. It will be interesting to see if others come up with still more data to display in this manner. And it certainly doesn’t look like a first timer’s attempt.
[via Reddit]
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