Weather Map

This decorative map visually represents relative temperatures and sunrise/sunset states for cities across North America.

Temperature Representation: City temperatures are displayed using LED colors mapped with the intuitive 'Jet' color scale.
Sunrise/Sunset State: The brightness of individual LEDs reflects the current sunrise or sunset state for each city.

The combination of data visualization and aesthetic design creates an engaging and functional display.

Project Scope:

This project is intended as a learning experience focusing on hardware and software integration using a Raspberry Pi (Bullseye).

Electrical system - designed according to best practices for the NeoPixels LED product. Harness layout, soldering, and troubleshooting is done by me.
Software - Using Meteostat and Suntime libraries to gather live weather and sun state data. Data parsing/interpretation is done by me. Data pushed to LEDs using Neopixel hardware interfacing libraries.
Map - the map is made using QGIS software with open source shape files from the Canadian and American Federal governments.

Digital timelapse of the weather map, made in Python using Matplotlib library. Data generation & time lapse generating scripts are found on my github (linked below).

This is a timelapse of the actual weather map in action the first day it worked!

Timelapse made with a second raspberry pi camera using Python scripts which are available on my Github profile.

Project Specifics:

Hardware:

LEDs - Neopixel through hole fully addressable LEDs
Power Source - 5V 45W DC power supply.
Capacitor - 10V 1000µF capacitor
Data Level Shifter (3.3V->5V) - Adafruit: 74AHCT125
Data Line Resistor - 400Ω
Controller - RaspberryPi Zero W

Software:

Raspbian Bullseye & Python 3.9.2
Req'd Python Libraries:
- Control Neopixels - adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel + rpi_ws281x
- Query Weatherstations - Meteostat
- Query Local Suntime - Suntime
- + other generic Python libraries for data processing. See Github Repo for details.

All source code used, including debugging files & detailed technical discussions are available on my public Github repository.