Weather Tracker - Arduino RGB LED Strip

Created by Enes

Using the Tool

First edit the "q" parameter to the City of your choice which shall be weather tracked.

PARAMS = {"q": "YOUR_CITY", "units": "imperial", "APPID": API_KEY}

Lastly you will need to input your Openweather API Key. This is free.

API = "https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather"
API_KEY = ""

That's needed in order to acces the Openweather API, we will retrieve our weather data through it.
You will be running the script locally so I won't be able to store your API key.

Optionally you can edit the interval in which the weather is tracked. Currently it's at 600 seconds -> 10 minutes.

def main():
    while True:
        try:
            time.sleep(600)
	    trackWeather()
	except Exception as exc:
            ...

Features & how it works

Whilst the Arduino Port is equal to None - meaning not connected through USB - it will keep checking the USB Ports of our devices (Raspberry Pi, Laptop, PC) for new plug-ins. If the Arduino has been plugged in to the device, it will automatically establish a connection using the Port

while(port==None):
    port = getPort()
    if port==None:
        print("[-] Failed to find the Arduino Port.\nRetrying in 5 seconds..")
	time.sleep(5)
    try:
	arduino = serial.Serial(port, 9600, timeout=1)
	print(f"[+] Successfully connected with Port {port}")
    except:
	print("[-] Failed to find an connected Arduino.\nRetrying in 5 seconds..")
	time.sleep(5)
	pass

Our USB Ports are found using the "list_ports" method of the serial library.

ports = serial.tools.list_ports.comports()
for p in ports:
    print(p)
    if "Arduino" in p[1]:
        port = p[0]
        print("[+] Found Arduino Port:", port)
return port

Next, we send a request to the weather API. This will respond with data such as if the weather is cloudy, rainy, clear and so on.
Fahrenheit is also returned, allthough I have converted it to celcius in the Python program.

def trackWeather():
    resp = requests.get(API, params=PARAMS)
    print(resp.json())
    weather = resp.json()['weather'][0]['main']       # This is the weather status
    fahrenheit = round(resp.json()['main']['temp'])
    celcius = round((fahrenheit - 32) * .5556)        # Converting the Fahrenheit to Celcius

This is where the fun part begins: Sending the colors, animations, the brightness ect. accordingly to the weather to our Arduino.
Feel free to play around with the values initialized at the very beginning.

elif weather == "Clear":
    sendData("B=" + br_Clear)
    sendData("D=" + dur_Clear)
    sendData("C=" + clearColor)
    sendData("A=" + ani_Clear)

Finally, we have two functions so the Arduino knows what's going on. The sendData() function & the awaitResponse() function:

def awaitResponse(s):
    time.sleep(.1)
    while (s.in_waiting > 0):                # The number of bytes in our input buffer
        print(s.readline().decode(), end="") # The Arduino side output

def sendData(s):
    arduino.flush()           # Waits for the transmission of outgoing serial data to complete
    s = s+'\n'                # We need a \n (new line) for any data we send, Arduino logic
    arduino.write(s.encode()) # Writes over our encoded data (B, D, C, A, P) in bytes
    awaitResponse(arduino)    # Awaits the respsonse of our Arduino
    time.sleep(.1)
    arduino.flush()

Related sources

• The ALA library
• The Openweather API

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