Pi Inky Weather Display

This is a weather display powered by a Raspberry pi and a 7.3in 7 color E-Paper (aka E-ink) display. Current and forecasted weather data is obtained from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology API.

Setup on Raspberry Pi

1. Get six character hash from https://geohash.softeng.co

2. Manually install bersion 1.5.0 release of the inky library, refer to the official documentation

3. Download and extract the latest release from the releases page for your architecture

4. Create a config file at ~/.config/pi-inky-weather-epd.toml with the following content:

[api]
location = "<Six character hash>"

[misc]
python_script_path = "/home/dietpi/Pimoroni/inky/examples/7color/image.py" # this is located in the files created by the inky library
python_path = "<The path to the python executable created by inky install script>" # should be in the environment created by the inky library

5. Create a cron job to run the script every hour

   0 * * * * cd <extracted directory location>arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf && sudo ./pi-inky-weather-epd > <extracted directory location>/inky.log 2>&1
   

Troubleshooting

cd into the extracted directory and run the script manually to see if there are any errors

cd <extracted directory location>arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
sudo ./pi-inky-weather-epd

Config

You can override the default config which are located at ./config/ by creating a file at:

~/.config/pi-inky-weather-epd.toml

Dietpi distro only

For dietpi distro, I had to set this config for the installion script to work:

include-system-site-packages = true

I also had to modify the installation script to have pip3 point to the environment pip3 as opposed to the system pip3

I also had to modify to manually install script to have pip3 point to environment pip3 as oppose to system pip3

TODO

• create a script that auto generates some/all weather variations
• Find out all the supported colors for the e-ink display
  • purple/whitish color?
  • Deep Pink
  • Other?

Inky Impression 7.3

supported colors

[0, 0, 0],        # Black
[255, 255, 255],  # White
[0, 255, 0],      # Green
[0, 0, 255],      # Blue
[255, 0, 0],      # Red
[255, 255, 0],    # Yellow
[255, 140, 0],    # Orange

Trial and error found colors

[255, 248, 220, 255], // Cornsilk
[255, 250, 205, 255], // Lemon Chiffon
[255, 20, 147, 255],  // DeepPink

Documentation

• EPD used: Inky Impression 7.3 https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression-7-3?variant=40512683376723
• Actual Panel: Waveshare display https://www.waveshare.com/7.3inch-e-paper-hat-f.htm
• Panel documentation: https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/7.3inch_e-Paper_HAT_(F)_Manual#Overview
• API: https://github.com/bremor/bureau_of_meteorology/blob/main/api%20doc/API.md

Developing

Your local config should go into config/local.toml, this file is not tracked

cp config/development.toml config/local.toml
cargo run

mDns

This is optional, but you can use mDns to access your pi by hostname instead of IP address.

sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon
sudo systemctl enable avahi-daemon
sudo systemctl start avahi-daemon

The pi should now be discoverable by <hostname>.local

Host pizero
  Hostname <hostname>.local
  User <your username or the raspberry pi>
  IdentityFile <path to your private key>
  ServerAliveInterval 60
  ServerAliveCountMax 240

ssh into it by running ssh pizero

Sending image to pi over ssh

Once you have your ssh setup:

chmod +x ./misc/send-img-to-pi.sh
cargo run
./misc/send-img-to-pi.sh