10/18/2023 Map Stopped Working?
Visit this post for the fix
I found the livesectional project by accident, but it happens to be the perfect answer to a project for a good friend of mine. Neither him nor I are pilots, or likely ever will be pilots, but he is a professional meteorologist who does a lot of forecasting for the aviation industry. He looks at metar data a lot for work. I thought that a nicely made map could be a really nice office decoration for him, so here we go.
I took the path of custom designing a PCB to hold all the LEDs and power circuitry. I do product design for my job, so I'm used to laying out PCBs. Though 143 LEDs got really repetitive. I haven't finished the final assembly, so for now CAD models will have to do. I'll share more photos once I've gotten the map print and finished assembly.
It's designed to fit in a cheap IKEA 250mmx250mm frame. I threw away the included spacer and designed my own to be 3d printed. The print has locating pins and holes for fasteners for attaching the back panel and PCB. The weird floating tab is for threaded inserts so you can attach a wall hanger or desk stand. Then a 3mm clear acrylic panel goes over the whole back. There is also a deep cutout to give access to the power jack.
The map print will be mounted to a 1.5mm sheet of black acrylic that has cutouts around each LED. My logic was the acrylic would stop leds bleeding to adjacent locations, and give the print a nice flat surface to mount to.
I went overboard and put the map outline on the PCB itself, because why not? It's not perfectly scaled and located, but it's close and you'll never see it once assembled.
I have the first PCB assembled, and it mostly works. However I now have a RevB on order to correct a few problems found during the first boot up. I have some circuity added that adds a small battery and does graceful shutdown of the pi incase the power gets pulled. Pis are famous for corrupting their sd cards if you just pull power (or the power goes out), so I try to avoid that whenever possible.
Again, I'll share more pictures when PCB rev B is here and I have the full thing assembled.
And just for fun, this isn't my first LED based weather data project. I designed this silly 3d printed "lamp" that displays basic animations to represent the current or forecasted weather. I owe the project a lot of updates, mainly posting the latest software build, and the latest hardware files because I've since designed a PCB to handle all the electronics (and add the same battery shutdown circuit). I also have a whole host of new animations to add. The project is literally just as useful as looking out the window, but it's a fun conversation starter.
Great project. I loved the video demonstrating its capabilities. Thanks for sharing it with us. - Mark
