Traffic Signal, Weather At A Glance
Restoring my late Grandfathers traffic signal into a purpose built "Weather At a Glance" display.
Project Sky Signal
Growing up my grandfather had a traffic light sitting in the corner of his shop. I always wanted to rebuild it as my great uncle had rebuilt one, mounted on a post in his poker room with the lights working. Over the years I had forgotten about it until I was helping my grandmother with some lawn work. I saw it in the corner and just felt like now was the right time. I have my own shop now and have some cool new ideas for it. I knew I didnt just want it to be as simple as a single switch with all the lights being on. The engineer in me wanted it to "do" something.
So what would it do?
First thought was to just program some different modes on an esp32 with the ability to cycle through them via a button. Then it came it to me. I didnt want this to just be a piece for me to display in my home office or myshop. I wanted others to see it. So why not hang it outside on from my shop eve? And doing so, what would it do? Well, thats where I came up with Sky Signal. I could use the traffic light and its three colors to display the weather. The esp32 could poll openweather every hour or every 3 hours and grab the weather description code. I could then link these codes to a single or series of light indicators. For example, code 800 is clear skys. So the light would display solid green for the next 1-3 hours. Code's 2xx are all variations of thunderstorms, so we could display trailing red and yellow and so on. But theres one other piece to this.
Only I would know what the light is doing. However this is an easy problem to solve. I also use this project to work on my html, css and js skills. Building a website that displays traffic light icon list showing what each color code entails. I could then tie this to a qr code and share it with neighbors and the community.
Hardware and Restoring the traffic signal
The Site
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