This Raspberry Pi Weather Station Displays the Forecast in Beautiful ASCII Art

ASCII art dates back to the earliest days of digital computing, when it was more of a necessity than anything else. When drawing programs were virtually nonexistent and computers couldn’t render images in any kind of detail, ASCII art provided a means of creative expression for computer users. Even after computers and software improved to the point where digital art was commonplace, many people continued to create ASCII art for use in text-heavy spaces like online forums and message boards. Hpsaturn must have been feeling nostalgic for those days when he built this Raspberry Pi weather station that displays the forecast in beautiful ASCII art.

ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange,” which is just an overly complicated way of saying that it is a standard that defines encoding for alphanumeric characters and symbols. The ASCII standard has been expanded over the years, but all you really need to know is that the term “ASCII art” usually refers to any pseudo-image that is made using characters you can type on your keyboard (though they may require alt-codes). The most basic example of ASCII art is the classic “:)” smiley face. But some people have taken the art form to extraordinary levels, like recreating the entirety of the first Star Wars movie with frames made using ASCII art. The art in this project is somewhere in-between those two extremes, with typical weather forecast graphics, such as clouds and rain, drawn using ASCII characters.

This weather station is controlled by a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. Any model should work, as this doesn’t require much processing power. A 4” LCD is connected via HDMI and shows three days of forecast information, with each day broken up into morning, noon, evening, and night, as well as the current conditions. All of those time blocks contain a brief description, the temperature, wind speed, and expected precipitation. That weather data is pulled from the Open Weather Map API over the internet. Because ASCII art is front and center here, this software, which is based on schachmat’s wego weather client, runs in the terminal. That is, however, running in a xinit window that is automatically launched in full screen when the Raspberry Pi boots up. Hpsaturn also includes instructions on a number of tweaks you can make to speed up the Raspberry Pi’s booting process. The result is a simple weather station that displays the forecast in a practical and attractive way.