January 2025 Project
The first project release for 2025 is the Snowy Day Display: a sparkling winter decoration that displays snowfall prediction at a glance!
Snowy Day Display
The main objective of the Snowy Day Display project is to create a visually interactive display for the daily snow forecast. After all sprints have been completed, the display will indicate how likely snowfall is to occur by lighting LEDs—more lit LEDs means higher chance of snow. Each sprint we will implement a fully functioning display, incrementally adding features until we achieve the main objective. This means that you can complete as many or as few sprints as you want and you will still have a fully capable display!
Features
Sprint 1: Blinking lights
We will spend our first sprint getting acquainted with physical computing by implementing the microcontroller version of “Hello World.” We will also design our display.
Sprint 3: Parse JSON forecast
We will extend our program to parse a static JSON forecast from the National Weather Service API and calculate the number of lights to turn on based on the chance of snowfall.
Sprint 2: Randomly blinking lights
We will update our blinking lights program to randomly select the position of lights to turn on and off. We will also prototype and make our display.
Sprint 4: Get forecast from NWS
In the final sprint, we will update our program to get the daily forecast for our local region directly from the NWS API every 24 hours.
PictoBlox (free)
We will spend our first sprint getting acquainted with physical computing by implementing the microcontroller version of “Hello World.” We will also design, prototype, and make our display.​
Arduino IDE (free)
In the second sprint, we will update our blinking lights implementation to randomly select the number and position of lights to turn on and off.​​