The MagPi - February 2020

the cassette player’s door was – to the millimetre

• the same size as a Raspberry Pi HAT. “At that
  point, all my other projects hit the back burner,”
  he says.
  “I’d been looking for a small case to hold a
  weather display for my desk for a while, and this
  was the perfect thing. I also had an unused Unicorn
  HAT HD lying around and this seemed like the ideal
  project for it.” To this he added servos and an awful
  lot of Sugru – a sort of malleable glue.

I’d been looking for a small case to hold a

weather display for my desk for a while

> ’s first tech Martin

encounter was

with a BBC Micro

at school

> He half expected

singers to appear

if music cassettes

were used with it

> Martin’s home

has 25 Raspberry

Pi devices for

both security and

entertainment

duties

> He has a ’lovely

but trashed’

1960s Dansette

radio ripe for

conversion...

> Key attraction:

it perfectly

matches the

colour scheme in

his bathroom

Quick FA C T S

The early 1980s-style

ambient IoT weather

display has a current

conditions animation

“In the past I’ve used Lego and Meccano to put

things together, but with space being so tight in

the case, I used Sugru this time around. It’s very

workable but sets hard like plastic, perfect for

fixing components in the right place.”

The WeatherMan currently relies on API data

from the Dark Sky weather service, but Martin

eventually hopes to link it up to a Raspberry Pi

weather station. “With a Raspberry Pi at each

end, it should hopefully be straightforward!” he

says optimistically.

Getting the details right

The main aim for what became the WeatherMan

project was to keep the exterior as true as possible

to the original. He wanted it to look like an

10 magpi.cc WeatherMan

PROJECT SHOWCASE