Makerspace Open Day – Weather Dashboard

During Ipswich Makerspace’s Open day on the 28th September, part of my display consisted of a Weather Dashboard, on a Pimoroni Hyperpixel 4. For this display, I used some preexisting code that I modified to work on the higher density of the screen.

I used PiWeatherRock that is maintained on Github by “Genebean”. You can find the code and clone it from the following URL:

https://github.com/genebean/PiWeatherRock

This worked fine out of the box, but the icons bundled were either too big or too small. So looking through the code, I found the developer was using some icons from Github. I also found that that developer had made them available in other sizes.

https://github.com/manifestinteractive/weather-underground-icons/

So I cloned that, found a size that looked a lot nicer and modified my repository to use the other size.

I’ve made some changes to incorporate these icons and have created a new repository on GitHub. My version is also preset to use the UK format (Celcius and not Fahrenheit).

https://github.com/vwillcox/PiWeatherRock-HyperPixel

The final changes I have made are to get this to run each time the RaspberryPi is rebooted using a System file:

[Unit]
Description=PiWeatherRock
Wants=network.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Environment=DISPLAY=:0
Environment=XAUTHORITY=/home/pi/.Xauthority
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /home/pi/PiWeatherRock/weather.py
Restart=always
RestartSec=10s
KillMode=process
TimeoutSec=infinity


[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target

You need to copy this as follows

sudo cp PiWeatherRock.service /etc/systemd/system
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable PiWeatherRock.service
sudo reboot

All being well, you should see that once the Raspberry Pi has rebooted, you should be looking at the weather on your attached HyperPixel 4