Plymouth Uni Weather Station

This small application makes use of the Arch-OS feeds provided by Plymouth University to display the wind conditions on campus. Experimenting with the feeds and designing the interface were both fun and challenging.

The Arch-OS system is managed by university lecturer Chris Saunders. It hosts a variety of feeds from sensors based around the Portland Square building, ranging from water temperature to lecture theater CO2 levels. I decided to experiment with just a couple of these feeds, the wind speed and wind direction.

After writing a class to handle the data I created two instances and got to work on the animation of the dials. I used the GTween engine to produce the animation and implementing the wind direction dial was easy enough. I decided to challenge myself and use a more exponential scale instead of a linear scale for the wind speed dial. I had some fun with the equations and offsetting the start point of the dial but in the end I got it working. The data is updated every five seconds and in the top right hand corner I placed a small animation to give the user feedback on the timing of the update.

Although this was a very small application, I very much enjoyed developing it and am pleased with my design for the interface. Having used an object-oriented approach to the developing I hope to expand the project and include more sensors in the future.

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