Physical Computing Final Project

The Last Step of a Weather App

After successfully connecting the Adafruit V2 board with a local node server, I continued working on the project and tried incorporating as many gadgets as possible.

I want to have an induction wire with several little LEDs that could float in water to achieve a similar snowglobe effect. Despite, the unsuccessful attempt, I still manage to find something that could fits the weather theme and long distance relationships

Building it.

The induction wire looks so cool, but incorporating it is a bit more complicated than I expected. Several things went wrong during the trial. First, it couldn’t be directly soaked in water, so I used UV glue to cover it. Second, even though I have a trigger switch given by my instructor, I couldn’t control each individual LED’s brightness or on/off state.

Originally, I wanted to create a fortune-telling device as the side of the main LED matrix. The little LEDs will be put in a water and dish soap mixer. Ideally, the mini LEDs will float slowly in the mixer. Then, the user will shake a glass bottle, the LED will blink at various rates; for example, the faster it blinks, the better the user’s luck will be. However, I never achieve an ideal density of the solution. They are either flowing too fast, or using vegetable oil is a bit messy.

In addition, I talked to several friends, and they all felt that blinking LEDs or flashing lights don’t convey the message about luck. Those signs are often associated with vitality or surprise. I need to find something else that is a more realistic form, maybe something that has already been associated with luck.

Therefore, I think Ema, small wooden plaques, common to Japan, in which Shinto and Buddhist worshippers write prayers or wishes, are a good fit for the fortune telling. I made four paper Emas with one LED light glued to the top of the plaques. After the user enters a city in the web page, they could pick a plaque and put it into the glass cylinder. The mini LED will show the color.

  • Green: greater than usual

  • Orange average

  • White, below average

  • Red, something is wrong

There is more to come. I plan to include at least four more variations of the fortune-telling results.

Coding part

Change the color mapping from Project 2 to the effects I designed in Project 1

Establishing Socket in the Adafruit device

Setting up the Wi-Fi SSID and password

Video & Afterwards:

The city I chose for my videos is all accidentally cloudy, some is rainy like Hongkong and Sunny in Taipei. But Orlando and Miami are both cloudy.

I felt I could redesign the webpage. It should have more functions like “Places I have looked up “ or adding to favorites for future visits.