weather-landscape

Note

This is a personal project that scratched an itch of mine and is designed for my particular use case and hardware only. I don't accept contributions unless they improve the documentation or fix a bug.

If you're using different hardware or are missing a feature, please fork it and get creative too :).

This is a rewrite of the awesome weather_landscape project. If you're confused what all this here is about, I highly recommend to check out the original project. It has a lot of great imagery describing the encoding principles, too.

Why?

I really fell in love with the idea behind weather_landscape when I first discovered it, but couldn't make it work on my hardware. So I was thinking. I wanted to get my hands dirty with esp32, but couldn't come up with a nice project to make use of it. So this was a perfect opportunity!

Additional features over the original

Apart from the features mentioned in the README of weather_landscape, this implementation also includes:

• Fog: On a foggy day you will see wavelike lines below the clouds. The more lines there are, the heavier the fog.
• Sleet: Apart from rain and snow, sleet is also shown as a mixture of rain drops and snow flakes.
• Thunderstorm: Clouds spit lightnings if there's some probability of a thunderstorm.
• Night mode: At night time the colors are inverted (white scenery on black background).
• Metrics: The server provides Prometheus metrics for monitoring. I use these to get alerted when the battery of the esp32 died, for example.
• Altitude: In addition to latitude and longitude, the server also optionally accepts an altitude for even more precise weather data.
• Randomness control: The /image.{format} endpoint supports the boolean query parameter wreck_havoc to add a lot of randomness to the weather data to make it seem unpredictable. This turned out to be really useful for testing. Additionally, the image endpoint accepts an optional seed query parameter (u64) which allows passing a seed to the RNG to make the randomness more predictable. If absent, the RNG used to render the image is seeded from the system entropy source.

Setup

server Setup

Note

All commands are relative to the server/ directory.

Adjust the config.toml to your needs.

cp config.example.toml config.toml
cargo run

Visit http://localhost:8080/image.{format} to grab the rendered image of the current weather.

Available {format} values are: epd (binary data, meant to be used by the esp32), png, gif and bmp.

esp32 Setup

Tooling installation

1. Install espup:

   cargo install espup

   Follow the guide to set espup up: espup-guide

2. Install espflash and cargo-espflash:

   cargo install espflash cargo-espflash

Prepare config and test

Note

All commands are relative to the esp32/ directory.

Adjust the cfg.toml to your needs.

cp cfg.example.toml cfg.toml
cargo run

Flash release build

cargo espflash --release --monitor

License

The source code inside this repository is licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.