Getting weather data to the shelf…
I need to lay down how I’m going to get the current weather information to the shelf so I can control the color LEDs on the shelf. Oh, here are the LEDs I’m going to use. The weather data I want is the current day’s conditions and the next three day’s weather conditions. This includes each day’s average winds and temperatures.
To the right is a quick diagram I threw together for the flow of the data. An Arduino on the back of the shelf uses WiFi to connect to the Internet. Every 15 minutes or so it will ask a PHP script for the weather data. At the bottom of the diagram is how the weather data will coded. We’ll keep it simple for now.
Next is the color scheme I came up with for current conditions. The Arduino will rotate through each color scheme depending on the current weather condition for that day:
There were about 30-40 possible weather conditions coming from WeatherUnderground’s APIs, so I categorized them into the 7 shown above.
Lastly, for the wind and temperature data, I’m still not sure what to do with it. I want the ForecastShelf to be tasteful, not flashing, so I want to add a “breathing” effect as it cycles through the color scheme patterns. Perhaps wind readings will control the speed of the breathing and the temperature will control the top amplitude of the LED brightness.
The PHP code and Arduino code are up on my GitHub.