USF Weather - in 3D!
Message from 2022
This post is pretty old! Opinions and technical information in it are almost certainly oudated. Commands and configurations will probably not work. Consider the age of the content before putting any of it into practice.
I’ve been working on preparing software to display weather information on a display in the NES building at school for the meteorology lab. At first, I decided to play it safe and smash together a PHP script that did it without fanfare, but since I had some free time over the break, I went with something more interesting/educational:
It fetches the maps and current conditions from the existing web server (they both change every few minutes, and the maps update seamlessly when they’re not visible, causing no noticeable jerkiness), and zooms in and out on each of the maps in sequence.
I’ve been toying with the idea of adding a little compass rose or animated windsock to describe the wind speed, and maybe use some shader effects for other conditions. Doing this pretty much requires the host machine to have a decent graphics card, so if I can’t do it in the permanent display it’ll still be something to show off at Engineering Expo.