Clear Sky Indicator

A nighttime indicator of predicted cloud cover for the coming hours. Also hopefully a weather indicator for the coming day.

Concept

The Problem

It's cold in winter, and it's not easy to see much of the sky from any of our windows. You can always check the weather forecast to see if it's worth bundling up for a little stargazing, but it's not something you always think about. This indicator intends to serve as an attractive nightly reminder when the sky is worth seeing.

Previous Attempt

An attempt was made at this sort of thing before. It was an Arduino with a WiFly shield, which would grab the current aviation weather conditions from the internet and parse out the cloud cover description. It would then light a single RGB LED in an appropriate color for the immediate conditions. It was a nice concept, but ran into unexplained and inconsistent issues with the fetching of the data. The project got tabled.

New Ideas

The expense of a 5 meter length of individually addressable RGB LED strip was justified partly for use as a wedding decoration, and partly for its potential to be used as a new interface for the clear sky indicator. Instead of only showing the current conditions, a strip of lights could summarize the conditions for a whole night. The same strip could also be repurposed in the morning as a general weather indicator for the coming day.

In the intervening time, I had also developed an interest in wireless networks using XBee transceivers. Since the XBees are much cheaper than the WiFly module, I decided to have the internet fetching and processing done via a computer (possibly our network storage device), which sends only the necessary information over the XBee network to an Arduino controlling the lights.