Particle Weather Widget

I love Particle. It’s the perfect combination of a little bit of hardware and a little bit of software. It removes all the annoying bits of creating a thing: the firmware flashing, the command-line debugging. It lets me just make things.

So when I found the Sparkfun Particle OLED Shield, I knew it could do something cool. A few days after it arrived, I stumbled upon this inspiring project. So I set out to create my own Particle Weather Widget, and here it is:

Particle has a trick up its sleeve that gives it a huge advantage over the Adafruit project: webhooks. Basically: webhooks make it easy to parse complex data (from forecast.io, for instance).

My version of a weather widget has a couple bits of polish that I want to point out:

1. It scrolls naturally. You might not notice it, because it looks natural. Scrolling at a linear rate, on the other hand, would look quite mechanical. Indeed, I used the same Accelerate-Decelerate function that can be found in the Android platform source code.
2. I recreated all the icons at a 32x32 resolution, by hand using Inkscape (to convert svg -> png), GIMP (to convert to 2-color), and LCD Creator. It’s a bit tedious.

Get the source code and tech details on GitHub