Maker Trevor Beaton has written a information to constructing your personal LED matrix climate show — a mission that handily acts as an introduction to Adafruit’s itsaSNAP Apple iOS app, too.
“You’ll be able to construct a beautiful climate show utilizing an Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 and a 64×32 RGB LED matrix,” Beaton explains of the mission. “Utilizing CircuitPython, you possibly can create a show that exhibits the present temperature and climate situations utilizing customized BMP [bitmap] graphics. The climate displayed is similar as your iPhone’s climate so you do not want a separate (paid/subscription) climate service and regardless of the place you reside, it is going to have the precise climate on your location.”
In case you’ve acquired an Apple iOS system, this climate show mission showcases the enjoyable you may have with Adafruit’s itsaSNAP app. (📷: Trevor Beaton)
Climate shows aren’t a novel idea — we have coated a lot through the years, from hacks for IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD lamps and colour-shifting grids to a “sensible girder” and a Raspberry Pi-powered touch-capable model — however Beaton’s tackle the idea leverages Adafruit’s itsaSNAP cellular app. That is no small factor: the place most climate shows depend on pulling information from a third-party software programming interface (API) over a direct connection, itsaSNAP can feed climate info from the smartphone on to the show — utilizing the identical info sources because the cellphone itself.
Designed to be used with the Adafruit IO cloud platform, itsaSNAP — appropriate with Apple’s iOS units solely — provides a code-free interface for pulling information from and pushing information to Adafruit IO. Within the case of Beaton’s climate show, it is used to tug climate information and ship it to an Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 driver board, powered by the Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller working CircuitPython, for formatting and show on a linked 64×32 RGB LED matrix.
The CircuitPython program working on the Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 handles formatting and graphical aptitude. (📷: Trevor Beaton)
“itsaSNAP consists of a number of actions for the Apple Shortcuts App, permitting you to combine Adafruit IO performance,” Beaton explains. “This mission focuses on sending present location climate information out of your iPhone to an Adafruit IO feed. The Matrix Portal will try and fetch climate information each thirty minutes. There are a number of graphics that symbolize the situations that may happen. There’s a graphic for cloudy, sunny, wet, or snowy days and a graphic for thunderstorms.”
The complete information is out there on the Adafruit Study portal.