Weekend project. Digitising #weather reports so I can have LEDs helping me dress every day (instead of the cognitive load of numbers & remembering what yesterday was like) #UX #design #electronics #informationDesign #watercolourpencils
Image first posted on instagram.
It all started with the London weather being a little bit nuts. One day was summer, the next winter, then rainy messy fall, and back to summer but only at lunchtime. I had all my jackets out, from the leather jacket to the heavy wonter coat. And I would wear them all in a week. Well, after a few weeks of being frazzled by weather, I sketched an electronics solution to my problem.
This is an information design problem solved with installation electronics. Well. Not quite solved yet. But getting there.
As a first pass, my partner helped me hook up the adafruit neopixels. The last time I played with electronics, about 12 years ago, there were no such things that I knew of. We ran a python script he’d found so they would run off a raspberry pi. They looked cool!
I spent quite some time defining the colours I wanted in RGB, but they didn’t look the same when displayed.
I’m still debugging that.
Another evening I started setting up access to the wunderground API so I would get data, but my computer decided to act like it was swimming through treacle. Not much was accomplished in three hours.
To be continued…