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While I'm talking about projects, here's my just-completed weather widget, based on a Pi Pico W and a 3.7" e-ink display. It reads the temperature and humidity from another Pico with a sensor attached that's out on the back porch, and the forecast from the National Weather Service, uses a bit of fuzzy logic to select icons, and displays as many as can comfortably fit into the allocated area of the display.

This is rather more than the Pico can do well by itself, so this is all done by a script on another machine; this device just requests it at suitable intervals and displays it.

It all started because I got tired of going and looking at the mercury thermometer out back to find the temperature, toyed with the idea of pointing a camera at it, and ultimately decided to make this instead.

(Actually the Pico can do all of that just fine, but doing dynamic text generation in arbitrary fonts on the device itself is a rather painful chore for memory and storage reasons. As I've got spare capacity on one or two always-on servers thought I'd delegate it to a web application that's running anyway.)

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@pieist Very nice. I particularly like the font work here.

@recantha It's ITC Kabel bold or demi, I've used it a lot over the years, very fond of it; carries a certain 1930s WPA poster art quality.

@recantha (Belatedly I see you're British, so I can mention I first stumbled on the font when trying to evoke the style of certain 1930s London Transport posters, which might be more meaningful to you than WPA.)

@pieist It looks great. Why does it need fuzzy logic to select the icons?

@jern There's a ton of permutations to the forecast text, even the terse form. The code has to decide which words are important, and also where they land in the sentence, to decide which of the very simple icons will actually tell you the important thing to know about the day or night. Will there be a storm? Early or late? Is it clearing or becoming cloudy? It might be mostly sunny with rain later... it could say anything. Freezing rain, chance of hail... I can show essentially one thing. What's the right thing to show?

@pieist Thanks. Sorry, misunderstood. Complex decoding.

@jern No it's a good question. The forecast is text in a not very predictable format, which could be succinct or not so much depending on how interesting the weather is going to be. And the icons I'm using are perforce very simple and represent just one thing. Automatically picking the one most likely to represent what you really want to know about the day based on what you hope is the most significant word or phrase in the forecast took a little doing. It's been a couple of weeks since I wrote that bit and it's choosing pretty well so far.

@pieist That sounds an ideal application for fuzzy logic.

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