a ‘thing a week and how to make them’ series of posts are planned for the new year, so just refining them at the moment.
I was also thinking about launching an open source collection so people can add to them, adapt, add their own designs, dials, files etc… so if anyone is interested do let me know in the thread,
I’d love to see a small version mounted behind a wood faceplate for a desktop, kind of like using the Steel Series gauges in a weewx skin. What hardware is behind the scenes there and how much power does it all draw ?
Sorry only just seen the post - i do have a smaller version, they are node mcus and servos linked to a couple of 3D printed gears. Tbh not sure of the power draw but i power three from a power pack for 3 days run time…
I have them mounted on a board now, I’ll post a pic once its all finally done,
I could see optional pointers that would sit vertically like real wind vanes. Horses, fish, eagles, carriages, roosters, etc. Time to fire up that 3D printer
Here is the working version - i have made it so the pointers can be changed - horses, fish, eagles, rooster etc just testing it now but its the same movement as the dials so it should just work
Careful with the partial updates. They need to be fully refreshed occasionally to avoid burn-in and damaging the screen permanently. I did some modifications to the clock portion of the raspi driver bcm2835 demo python script in order to keep clock ticking on my 2.13" waveshare and didn’t do the right full refreshing, and saw significant ghosting in under 24 hours of runtime. Fortunately after running their demos a few times to do it the right away ‘and’ leaving the zeroWH powered down for a couple weeks the ghosting seems to have gone away. Whew.
I’m assuming you’re running HA on a pi zero behind the screens (???)
Yep, there is a Pi running HA which pulls in the WF data via an MQTT feed. The screen has partial updates but also runs a full update every couple of hours.
So far so good - HA is quite good for setting up eink screens, it takes quite a lot of the pain away compared to a standard Arduino approach …
I finally (after 8 hours) got python 3.8 and HA compiled and running on a zero WH. What did you add to the pi to get it to talk to the epaper display via HA ? I assume there’s something needed to add the platform in HA but I sure can’t find it via google or the cryptic HA sites…
(the zeroWH took many hours to compile+test python, when it was 7 minutes on a i3 gen8 NUC. Geez the zero is a slow box. I never thought the HA installation was ‘ever’ going to complete).
If you want to PM me or email to not take over this thread, that’s cool. I know we have a 8 hour time difference so it’ll be slow if we get into back+forth mode.
Morning - ok HA is running on a PI with the WF data coming in via MQTT, but the display will of course show any HA data and WF can be imported various ways.
The eink is using the waveshare screen and a NodeMCU (one of these - [Link to NodeMCU - amazon)) using the esphome integration (added in HA via Supervisor (the house icon), addonstore and then esphome. The addonstore is great as you can also install things such as nodered, grafana etc with ease.
I’ll leave it there for this thread - pm me and we can pick it up with the wiring for the nodemcu, setting it up etc - once its in place its quite nice and quick compared to standard Arduino routes.
aaaaah, I misread then. I was hoping the pi was attached to the epaper display and that no ESP or remotely served protocols like MQTT were needed. That’s a lot of moving parts.
I’ll just do a python thing to display directly on the epaper I guess. Thanks for the clarification.
I found the Pi to be quite good with eink screen, but you can’t do the deep sleep - if your not worried about that though they work well - do let us know how you get on and what you build, would love to see.
If it helps - I have a write up/github of something call a ‘THE’ - Time, Headlines Environment using the Pimorini eink screen, I had a script that took in WF data and converted it to words - ie The Weather is 20oC and Sunny, the wind is 18mph from the South West etc…
If anyone is interested the various 3D models in this thread, including the Barograph can now be viewed in 3D via SketchFab - more are incoming, its part of the journey to then putting all the files online to print:
Evening all - as I noted a few times over this thread it was always the plan to open-source the data gauges so owners of Personal Weather Stations could make their own - we used a Tempest for most of our feeds so any early heads up on Open Gauges: