#forecast.io

Old School Analog Meters Tell you the Weather

A home weather station is great geek street cred. Buying a commercially available station will get you all the bells and whistles, but the look tends to the utilitarian. And then there’s the trouble of placing the sensor array somewhere. To solve both problems, [GradyHillhouse] built this unique weather station with analog meters. Based on a Particle Photon pulling weather data from the forecast.io API, values for temperature, pressure and the like are sent to analog IO pins. Each pin has a meter with a trimmer pot for calibration and a custom printed label. There’s also a digital output that …read more #Analog, #Api, #ForecastIo, #Meter, #Milliammeter, #MiscHacks, #ParticlePhoton, #Weather

Rainfall is one of the most useful pieces of information to know about the weather. Rather than “it will rain sometime today,” get weather forecasts more like “heavy rain starting in five minutes, for the next 45 minutes.”

Weather apps and websites are a dime a dozen. Most of them will tell you whether it’ll be sunny, cloudy, or rainy on any given day. iPhone users have long loved Dark Sky, but the same information is available via a website and Android apps.

On the Web –

Forecast.io

On the web, forecast.io is an excellent website for finding this information. Give it your exact physical location — down to a street address, not just an entire city — and it’ll provide forecasts for your area.

Rather than a few icons with information about the average weather each day, you’ll see a forecast for the next hour, next 24 hours, and next week. You can drill down and look at each weekday to see the projected precipitation for each day and click to see exactly when in the day the forecast projects it’ll rain.

Last week, in addition to my adventures with functional programming, I started getting acquainted with Node.js.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet. It is definitely very cool, but I'm still getting used to the way things are structured.

I built this command line app as I was learning my way around making server requests and handling the responses. Already, I can appreciate the effects of its non-blocking IO. If I enter several ZIP codes into the command, the results don't necessarily come back in the order that they were entered. First come, first returned.

In order to get weatherNode to return a forecast for a given ZIP, it has to make two API calls. The first is to GeoNames, which returns a set of coordinates for a given ZIP code. These coordinates are passed into a callback function that requests the forecast data from Forecast.io.

If we could pass ZIP codes directly to Forecast.io, that would save weatherNode a step, but I'm happy with the way this turned out to be a learning opportunity for setting up callback functions. It's pretty neat that the application handles the sequence of steps for each ZIP code entered separately, as if the others weren't even there.

New Post has been published on http://awesome-facts.net/ysk-about-forecast-io-a-lightweight-and-informative-weather-service-website-with-a-concise-and-easy-to-use-mobile-version/

YSK about forecast.io, a lightweight and informative weather service website with a concise and easy-to-use mobile version.

I've really been enjoying playing with Arduinos lately.

I'd love to expand this "Weather Station" to include a more in-depth forecast, and maybe light up LEDs for weather events -- blue for rain, white for snow or ice, red if there's a severe weather alert.

Built with:

Spark Core

Forecast.io api (free tier)

Spark Fun LCD Button Shield

Forecast.io is my current weather “app” of choice

Forecast.io has quickly become my go to weather source. Ever since a friend pointed me to the site I refuse to use any other source for the latest outlook. While it’s very iOS-esque and only has an official app for Apple products, the simple clean look works quite well. The interface is not the most user friendly (read: intuitive) thing in the world, but once you get used to it there is no…

Props to Forecast