Dedicated Display Console

the one thing I’ve learned is that even when you made the perfect gui, people want to be able to change things like color, font etc. It really isn’t any better, but it makes them feel it is better, because now it is a bit of their own design and therefore they think it is better.

1 Like

I like the Belchertown skin in WeeWX in dark mode. Pat O’Brien really did an awesome job with the layout, and it’s my go-to home weather display…

2 Likes

Just get a 2nd hand old android or the like and BOOM! I have 2 old phones on the lowest brightness unless I can’t see them. I have stuck them up using double-sided


magic tape stuff

2 Likes

Question for developers… after I let you know how much I am enjoying your Tempest product.
My son and I are both very intrested and hopeful that you are at least considering the development of a perminent indoor display that could receive the data from the Tempest outdoor unit simultaneously to the receipt of that data by the Wi-Fi interface ‘toaster’. I understand that this display would be unnecessary for many folks but I have seen much discussion about this and my son and I would both be immediate purchasers when it became available. Please advise if this has or is being considered. I hope y’all have at least explored the possibility to the point of doing market research and identifying if the return on investment would likely be reasonable… or not. Thank you

Do you have an old iPad or Android tablet? They work great as permanent always on displays. Just load up the same app or webpage you already use, change the settings to Always On and Full Screen, and done! I have 2 tablets running 24/7 for well over a year now.

2 Likes

How about the wfpiconsole? (PS. shameless plug from the developer)

4 Likes

I realize you can use a tablet of your own to view all the weather apps from tempest and I do use an android tablet always on as a seperate way to watch. However I can’t see everything on this tablet at once due to the limited size of my screen. I too would love to see weatherflow produce there own display big enough to see it all and enjoy the extra viewing from another location in the house. Hope they will strongly consider putting there own display out there for sale with backup in case of a power failure…

2 Likes

I have mine on an old iPad, it is on all day by my computer.

3 Likes

Amazon can sell their Fire 10" tablet for $99 on sale every month or so, because they buy in million-unit orders to keep the cost per unit low. WF would be best-case developing a unit to be sold only in quantities of hundreds, and I suspect that the cost would be three times what the Amazon Fire 10" tablet costs in such low quantities. It makes no business sense to make a custom display for a niche market…

2 Likes

Maybe this feature request should be for a tablet-friendly landscape orientation layout in the iPad and Android apps???

4 Likes

Not too shameless…!:wink:

Last link on page below link took me to is broke. Need link to display unit (cost). What would you charge to build & provide, fully programmed & functioning? If not you, what would a ‘fair cost’ be, including procuring, building, programming, etc. - I don’t mind paying a reasonable cost for the effort…

jc

Yeah, I fired up an old tablet, & yes, I can display a ‘repeat’ of the data as see in another’s picture above. I guess my chief issue with this is it’s ‘simple’ format. I’d make much better use of (ie. Actually Use…) of a ‘conventional’ weather display allowing displaying a compass rose with arrows for wind (with a ‘resettable’ arc for max’s), a circle or arc for pressure, ‘thermometer bars’ for… temperature, precipitation, etc. I desire an interactive GRAPHICAL display with user setable features on a fixed, dedicated dusplay… the Pi display referenced in the ‘shameless plug’ above (should be shameless, very nice layout result) comes much closer to ideal, in my view. I’d (gulp…) be willing to pay a small subscription fee to have a ‘site page’ as described as opposed to the ‘spartan grid’ provided gratis… then I’d be happy with my old tablet on a dedicated station web page…

2 Likes

What’s reasonable ?

Peter’s wfpiconsole is still the prettiest display solution I’ve seen, but it is pretty painful to build the software side. You need to have a CheckWXAPI account and set up an API key there. You also need to specify your station(s) and sensor(s) individual IDs to the installation script. The installer also checks that the data is valid before proceeding, so you can’t even fake it with “TBD” as your answers.

So unless you asked for somebody to do all the dirty work and have ‘your’ private API key (bad idea) and the account credentials to set it up (worse idea), then I dunno how much you could outsource this one at this time.

Perhaps it could be faked if you would be willing to edit the underlying text file. Maybe we could cook up some quick way to help you do that. Should be easily doable.

@peter - I’m thinking along the lines of a “wfpiconsole-reconfigure” script like your installer, with just the answer the questions part in it. If we had that kind of utility, then I’m thinking that even cooking up a dpkg of an installed-yet-unconfigured wfpiconsole is doable. Install it once. Anonymize the credentials in it to ‘TBD’, package it up. No more waiting for the zillion packages to install. Just install one dpkg and go. Run one command to install that. Run one command to reconfigure it. Boom.

2 Likes

Tablets are just too cheap to be able to make a specific stand alone display.

2 Likes

I am using an older iPad, but it is a waste of a perfectly good iPad to dedicate it to this, and besides, it really isn’t perfectly stable. I find I have to exit and restart the app at least once a day because information (everything below the UV index) goes missing or it freezes. I want a dedicated, nice looking display!

What I would love is if the tablet app offered either a few cosmetic screen choices or a few cosmetic customization choices. I would love a more colorful, higher-contrast display that showed the current temperature in a bigger font so it was easy to read across the room. Failing that, it would be really cool it the key parameters could be made available via URL so that anyone could put together a customized windows widget for Rainmeter. Then we could display something more like the AcuRite, Sainlogic, or La Crosse displays. For me, the sensing hardware is terrific. The bland display is the only weak point. And that’s easily fixed with a bit of HTML.

3 Likes

You’ve always been able to do this.

Query the API for your station and parse the data then display it any way you desire with any tool you desire. Most people tend to use Home Assistant or Node-Red for this kind of stuff.

Thank you so much! I will start on my learning curve as soon as I have some spare time. I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction. Thanks!

I bought a $35 Amazon Fire Tablet (brand new) and attached it to a frame ($6 - Target). You have to install the Google Play Store, and download an app that prevents the display from sleeping (both are easy to do, just google for directions). Would I rather have a true Tempest display? YES! But I also don’t want to pay $100 for it, so this is a good compromise.

9 Likes

No need for an app to keep the screen awake

Tap Settings

Scroll to Always On Mode > Tap to toggle
Gif_20220104055649

8 Likes