Peter Holderith’s Weather Orbs is a Raspberry Pi Zero W-powered desktop weather station that displays animated weather data from NOAA and NWS on three small round displays connected over SPI.
Internally it’s an add-on board that connects to the 40-pin GPIO header of the Raspberry Pi Zero W and with three additional headers to connect the smartwatch round displays.
The PCB also comes with 16 RGB LEDs to create some nice lighting effects.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W and accompanying electronics are housed in a custom “high-quality” 3D printed enclosure with a cover made of brushed stainless steel, and thick glass magnifiers complete the design for a retro style.
The default firmware fetches weather data, such as live satellite images from NOAA or radar from NWS, and displays those on the three round displays. It also starts a Wi-Fi hotspot called “weatherorbs” to which the user can connect and then navigate to “weatherorbs.local” or the device’s IP address to input WiFi SSID and password to connect to your network as a client device.
From there, the Weather Orbs can be configured from your smartphone or computer’s web browser to change the location, display configuration, the color of the RGB LEDs, and other settings. Alternatively, you should be able to program the Raspberry Pi Zero W to leverage the three displays for other purposes such as displaying traffic cameras or live views of national parks.
Peter told CNX Software the project is not open-source at the moment, but he’s not ruling out releasing the source code – considering it’s fairly simple – after the Kickstarter campaign.
The crowdfunding campaign aims to raise $48,000 with close to $14,000 pledged so far. Rewards start at $160 for a fully assembled Weather Orbs to be shipped by May 2024, or you can pay $20 more to get one of the first 500 units to be shipped by February 2024.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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