My Neighbor Totoro Toy Modified with LED Eyes for Weather Forecasting
Lovely project from John Graham-Cumming that is very fitting with the Totoro toy already holding an umbrella – providing a blinking-eyes solution to the always-pressing question, “Do I need an umbrella?”
Regular readers may know that I like ambient devices: devices that fit into the environment unobtrusively and provide information at a glance. One such device is my bus monitor that shows times of buses at the stop near my house.
Recently I decided to solve the problem of answering the question “Do I need an umbrella?” when I leave the house. For this I chose to use an ESP8266 in the form of a NodeMCU running Lua and display the coming weather by illuminating the eyes on a small Totoro figure.
The Totoro conveys the following with its eyes:
Red: heavy rain
Blue: rain
White: snow
Flashing white/black: hail
Yellow: sunny
Flashing red/blue: Internet or API connection problem
Flashing green: updating weather forecast
Black: no special weather
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