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Lighted TAC Chart with Weather Information

LEDs show weather information on the Seattle Terminal Area Chart

pierre-cauchoisPierre Cauchois
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I'm using some old BlinkM lights I had in a drawer to display airport weather information on the Seattle Terminal Area Chart. Makes up for a nice display to check quickly before heading to the airport :) Inspired by Dylan Rush's work: http://blog.dylanhrush.com/2017/07/live-sectional-map.html

There's really not much to this project. a small piece of code gets the METAR from the aviation weather website and decodes it, then turns it into a color for each of the airports with weather information on the Seattle Terminal Area Chart.

The BlinkM LED lights are hooked to the i2c port of the Rasperri Pi Zero and driven using Johnny-5.

The longest thing to do with this project was to measure the (x,y) position of every airport on the chart and then cut out the foam backing that would hold the LEDs.

I decided to not cut through the chart and instead have the LEDs shine from behind so that it doesn't look weird if it's turned off.

  • 12 × BlinkM LEDs https://thingm.com/products/blinkm/
  • 1 × Seattle TAC Chart Aeronautical chart of the Seattle area
  • 1 × Foam backing
  • 1 × Raspberry Pi Zero Runs the code that retrieves the weather information

  • Wiring the LEDs and Running the code

    Pierre Cauchois • 01/21/2018 at 07:42 • 0 comments

    After a failed attempt at building my own custom cables to link LEDs together and to the Raspberry Pi, I ended up taking the easy route and using wire wrapping. turns out the connections are strong, wires are light, and provided that the i2c clock is slowed down enough (baud rate is not exactly important for this application) it's pretty stable.

    On the "brains" side, I've decided to go with a Raspberry Pi Zero W because it's small and lightweight, and wifi is built-in.

    On the software side of things, I elected to go with Node.js as the platform because i'm fairly proficient with it, and wrote a couple of modules to run as daemons on the Pi: a "monitor" module that reports on my personal IoT solution (based on Azure IoT Hub, I like to know when and how my devices are running) and a "ledtac" module that gets the weather, and converts the Metar information and drives the LEDs. All of this is orchestrated using PM2 and the OS is a hardened, auto-updating version of Raspian Lite (Stretch)

    What remains is to build a custom frame, and check if everything runs smoothely over the course of a few days. the goal of this thing being to run all the time, I want it to be stable and not a project that runs a few minutes and disappears in a drawer...

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