littleBits Projects: Real-Time Weather Dashboard

This is part of an on-going series of posts about littleBits projects. littleBits is available in the Adafruit store – Base Kit,Deluxe Kit, Synth Kit, Space Kit, Arduino ModuleArduino Starter Bundle, Sequencer Module, and Cloud Starter Bundle.

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With a cloudBit and a little coding knowledge, you can make your own Real-Time Weather Dashboard. This littleBits project monitors and displays current and forecasted weather conditions in your area. These customizable and modular weather boxes display current temperature, the forecasted high and low temperatures for the day, and the forecasted conditions for the day (i.e. sunny, cloudy, precipitation).

We wrote a program that will read the data from the Weather Underground API and pass that information on through the littleBits cloud to each of the cloudBits. You can check out our example on gitHub. Every 30 minutes the program asks Weather Underground for the current temperature and the forecasted high, low, and conditions for New York, NY. Then it converts this information into a voltage* which is sent to each cloudBit, adjusting the angle of the servos that correspond to various graphics on each box.

*The program does not specify the volts, rather it sends a value from 0 to 100 which tells the cloudBit what percentage of the total power (5v) to output.

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The circuit in each box is very simple: USB power + cloudBit + servo. In each weather dashboard, the same circuit reacts to different sets of data and responding accordingly. Now with the ability to connect to the internet, this simple circuit actually becomes very dynamic, and makes possibilities of designing with hardware limitless.

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  The cloudBit gives you the power to design and build your own internet connected devices, enabling you to design products/projects that are specific and relevant to you. For more project ideas check out our Projects Page.

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