/InkyPhat-Weather-2019

National Weather Service web scrape displayed on Pimoroni InkyPhat

Primary LanguagePython

InkyPhat-Weather-2019

Time & National Weather Service web scrape is displayed on a Pimoroni InkyPhat.

Pimoroni's weather example stopped working on 01/03/2019 -- It relied upon Yahoo Weather, which curtailed its services at that time.

Here is my totally amateur version used to regain functionality.

Design Notions:

  1. Time & weather forecast are updated separately, with individually selectable intervals.

  2. Inky display is updated every 3 minutes. (Mostly due to the painfully slow refresh rate of E-paper, but this may extend service life too. clean.py isn't 100% effective against "burning")

  3. Time is secured from System time, and the display is set to be 3 minutes fast. Then it'll be two minutes fast; Then one minute. Then it updates & leapfrogs the display again. So, it's a bit fast sometimes, but never late. A reasonable compromise? Good enough for me.

  4. Selected weather provider is United States National Weather Service (weather.gov). Some other providers: Meteorologisk Institutt (met.no), OpenWeatherMap.org

  5. Weather info is scraped using BeautifulSoup.

High/Low Temps are garnered from the website's 7-day forecast, with periods labeled, "Today", "Tonight", etc. Federal holidays & unusual weather conditions (e.g. "High Wind Advisory") can blow-up the BeautifulSoup scrape. That's because, in addition to Python, I don't understand BeautifulSoup either. Yet. So... There's some kludgery incorporated to account for odd conditions & preserve display formatting.

Anyway, it works & I like it.