Physical Computing Project One
The first step of a Weather App
I want to eventually develop a weather app for people who are in long-distance relationships. It is built from my personal experience. From a usually weather app, it only shows numbers, and a simple graphic that represents the weather but it doesn't provide any deeper connection with the person. It is a device that could help parents, lovers, and friends emotionally understand the weather in another location.
Building it.
I used materials from the University of Miami’s Interactive Media Department in Classroom 1018 and purchased empty envelopes from Micheals. The device I used is the Circuit Playground.
I used a Cricut Maker to cut out the shape I wanted to display the LED matrix. In addition, I found resources online and AI to help me build the code in
Purpose
This is the first step of my project, I want to learn more about coding in Python and working with Circuit Playground. From this project, I wish to experiment with how to represent each weather condition with an LED matrix. At the end, I have five weather conditions that I successfully programmed, sunny, rain, cloudy, lighting, and snow. I wish I could include windy, and partially sunny.
Coding part
Understanding how the LED matrix works
Firstly, I realized that the order of each individual LED in the matrix doesn’t follow an intuitive order, from left to right, like
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
8, 9, 10……
but from the bottom up:
15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Therefore, if I want to utilize the LED matrix I need to reflect this situation in my code.
Also, I used a clear display function but I couldn’t use it every time due to the memory shortage.
Sunny Effect
I used a diagonal fade effect from yellow to red. Each time, it will shoot a gradient color that is closer to red.
Rainy Effect
Cloudy Effect
It doesn’t work that well because sometimes the random point is on the edge of the matrix and the “cloud” only has one or two lines which is hardly recognizable as a cloud.
Snowy Effect
Thunder Effect
This effect has a similar issue as the cloudy effect. Also, the thunder is designed to be a rectangle but ideally, it should be a triangle or a pixelated swirled line. I would have to find a better representation of this effect.
Slider Control
To demonstrate each effect, I created a list and used the switch to make it either go down or up the list.
Afterwards:
I felt I would need to have an Adafruit device with more memory space for the calculation. Also, I need to work on Adafruit IO and learn more about the itsaSNAP app.