Quick test connecting Raspberry Pi Pico W with Inky Pack to the Open-Meteo API
In previous weather projects I used commercial APIs by Weather Underground, OpenWeatherMap and DarkSky, all of which ended up causing me problems down the line, so I had a look at a possible replacement - ideally Open Source - for 2022 and stumbled across Open-Meteo.
It has a friendly easy-to-use interface with no need for an API key, making it ideal for a quick Sunday afternoon project.
This demo is more of a proof-of-concept, rather than ready for actual use:
- Creating a full screen jpg image for every weather condition is hacky at best and leaves ugly artefacts.
- Instead of going to sleep in a low power state the script simply waits for 60s and reboots the pico.
- The restarting was also necessary to avoid running out of memory, as repeated jpg loading seemed to do (and I failed to clear up the mess in the pico's memory).
- Follow the instructions at https://github.com/pimoroni/pimoroni-pico/tree/main/micropython/examples/pico_inky#wireless-examples to install the required libraries and files to your Pico.
- Upload the icons folder to the root of your Pico.
- Adjust the LAT and LNG constants in the script and upload it to the pi as main.py