The weather, said the way a person would say it. One plain sentence you can read from across the room — “Dry until about 4, then light rain. Warmer than yesterday.” — with the next twelve hours as a soft temperature curve, the rain marked underneath, and the week ahead, all under a sky that matches the real one. There is also a picture-book version for children, with a small cloud who dresses for the day.
Open-Meteo, read directly in the browser: no key, no account, and no server of ours in between. Each screen asks about every 15 minutes, far inside the free ceiling, and “Weather data by Open-Meteo.com” (CC BY 4.0) is shown on screen. The free API is for non-commercial use. Place search, on the setup page only, uses Open-Meteo’s geocoding.
Puff, an original round cloud, carries an umbrella and wears boots in the wet, a scarf, hat and mittens in the cold, sunglasses and a sun hat in the sun, and falls asleep at night. The rules are fixed, not random. The only number on screen is the temperature, with four icons for now and the next nine hours, and the sentence is still there for a screen reader.
A latitude and longitude (it defaults to Greenwich), and a screen you can read from across the room. It never goes blank: if a poll fails the last good forecast stays up with a quiet “as of” time, and the last response is kept in the browser for up to three days. Units, clock and the day, night or auto look are all in the URL.
Setup
A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.
F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.
Configuration
Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at weathervane.livingkiosk.com/setup.
| Parameter | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
lat, lon | Greenwich, London | Both or neither. Out-of-range pairs are ignored. |
place | the coordinates | What to call it. |
units | guessed from the browser | metric (°C, km/h) or imperial (°F, mph). |
theme | auto | day, night, or auto, which follows the sun at the place. |
kids | off | on for the picture-book version. |
clock | guessed from the browser | 12 or 24. |
demo | — | Made-up weather, no network, for previews: clear, cloudy, rain-later, rain, clearing, storm, snow, fog, heat, wind or cold. |
dim | 0 | Black scrim over everything, 0 to 0.8 (fleet-wide convention). |
Weathervane is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.