Weather dashboards are a dime a dozen but I have been looking for one that is e-paper based primarily to serve 2 purposes:
- Battery Life: E-paper based screens are not consuming power when they are displaying information, only when they need to reach out to the internet to obtain it.
- Crisp Display: E-paper screens can fit a lot more information in the same area, while providing an easy to read, natural display.
After some basic research, I found the ESP-32 LilyGo E-Paper screen to be a good solution. It seemed like the smallest possible screen that could fit all the weather related stats. An open source project (detailed instructions here) for gathering the weather data from OpenWeather APIs and drawing them on the e-paper screen already existed, I just had to tweak a few things related to the location, aggregate rain data etc that I wanted to customize for myself. I was able to get it up and running in a matter of a couple of hours. The battery life turned out to be pretty good as well, about 40 days on a full charge. I was hoping it would be higher though. I could tweak it to obtain weather data from the internet just twice a day or so, its not like the weather in the bay area changes dramatically in the span of a few hours. That should help considerably. But for now, I am quite satisfied with it.
