Steampunk Weather Station

Steampunk - and suddenly a modern e-ink? But the world homemade I saw not such incredible combinations. Moreover, in the proposed design of the author Instructables under the nickname MrLeeh, all this looks very organic. The weather station does not require sensors - neither built-in nor remote; it receives weather information from openweather.org

The device includes: Raspberry Pi Zero W, a 16 GB memory card, a 7.5-inch Waveshare e-ink display, a “hat” with a universal driver for the same manufacturer’s display, a wooden photo frame in 10x15 cm format ( common) with a depth of at least 20 mm to fit the entire electronics, USB-cable and the corresponding power supply, steampunk accessories - corners, gears. On the “hat” of the display driver there are already sockets for the comb, and in the Raspberry Pi Zero W the comb is not soldered, so the master soldered it. He made the rest of the connections without soldering. I cut a recess for the cord, in which I fixed it with a glue gun, leaving a small supply of cord in the case.

I read in the nineties a book about the device calculator. Her author admired that the case of this device, if it is large, is almost empty: a small board, and air around. As in the joke about double bass: a piece of air upholstered by boards. Here is about the same:



Only all this would be good to fix:



And here you are given a unique opportunity to look at the e-ink display from the back and see a negative image:



The display turned out to be slightly smaller than the glass of the frame; I had to close it on the sides with cardboard. The master glued the steampunk accessories with a glue gun:



Having assembled the hardware, the master took up the software. I downloaded and installed it on the memory card. A convenient program for this operation is.

After writing Raspbian to the card, MrLeeh reconnected it to the computer as a regular drive, where in the / boot folder he created an empty file called ssh and the wpa_supplicant.conf file with the following contents:

country = US
ctrl_interface = DIR = / var / run / wpa_supplicant
GROUP = netdev
update_config = 1

network = {
    ssid = "WIFI_SSID"
    scan_ssid = 1
    psk = "WIFI_PASSWORD"
    key_mgmt = WPA-PSK

}

Why US, if the developer lives in Berlin, I don’t know, but he replaced WIFI_SSID and WIFI_PASSWORD with the corresponding parameters of his router. Disconnected the memory card from the computer, placed it in the Raspberry Pi, turned it on, waited for the download, connected to it via SSH:

$ ssh pi@raspberrypi.local

On Windows, the installation of a third-party terminal program that starts in a different way can be convincing; on Linux and MacOS, everything you need is already there. After connecting, the wizard entered the raspberry password and immediately changed it to another passwd command. Installed Python, package manager, fonts:

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

$ sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip python3-smbus python3-serial python3-dev
$ sudo apt-get install -y fonts-freefont-ttf wiringpi git
$ sudo pip3 install pillow requests

Configured display support by.

Installed the weather station script:

$ git clone https://github.com/stlehmann/rpi_epaper_weatherstation.git weather
$ cd weather

Registered and received the key to the API.

He indicated his location and key (when repeating, change to yours), ran the script:

$ export OWM_LOCATION = "Berlin, de"
$ export OWM_API_KEY = "yourapikey"
$ python weather.py

Soon after, an image appeared on the e-ink display. The weather station is ready to go.