Hey all,
I'm trying to determine the easiest way to retrieve weather wirelessly. Whatever I use it must be on the compact side. Using an old flashed router just won't cut it.
Any ideas would be appreciated,
Thanks.
I'm trying to determine the easiest way to retrieve weather wirelessly.
Look outside - actual weather brought to you by photons 
Seriously, with an Arduino you can use a wifi shield (wireless ethernet) that contact one of the many internetsites that provides an RSS feed with weather information. What location you want the weather form? What set of information do you need/want? Do you want to control something with it or just "read the values".
Or did you have another form of wireless in mind?
Furtehrmore what is you knowledge level in programming as ethernet apps are not really starter apps.?
a weather radio? it'd help if we knew what you were hoping to input and output
Hey, sorry about the amount of information. I was asking it open ended as sort of a brainstorming session...
anyway, here's the idea:
A small unit that uses inductive charging to charge a cell phone. That will be purchased whole. I would like for the unit to use mood lighting to give you an idea of the weather later on that day. Yellow is warm and dry, deep blue is rainy, blue and pulsing red is thunderstorms etc etc.
The clincher is it needs to be pretty slim. WiFi would be the best but I'm having trouble locating a good unit. I'd rather use a UNO + wifi addon because then I can use the UNO's PWM output to control the LEDs. The Wifi mini arduino units I've seen don't have PWM output if I recall correctly.
Anyway, I hope that helps in terms of info. 
Thanks all,
Luke
does the wifi part have to be on the dock? could you segment it, maybe a small wireless receiver in the light part, and a weather processing base somewhere else that would relay the information?
I would like everything to be contained within the unit. I will post up a sketch to give you all a better idea.
Here's a quick sketch that should give you all a better idea of what I'm aiming for.
Here's a quick blurb I just wrote up about the idea.
Inductive charging gives the user a simple and natural way to charge. The user places their phone on the unit and charging begins. There is no risk of tugging on the charger, and the phone can be picked up off the charger at a moments notice. A dock is a good option but docks don't lend themselves to the simple and clean aesthetics of an inductive charger.
Weather is a significant part of our everyday lives. However, anyone can just look out the window and see what the weather IS. In some areas of the country, New England specifically, weather can make drastic changes. It can be sunny and beautiful in the morning, and thundering with heavy rain in the afternoon. The weather function of the unit will aim to predict weather about 4-6 hours in advance, in a natural and qualitative manner.
Inductive charging via Powermat
Weather prediction for later via LED arrays
Unit made of acrylic (frosted one side, gloss on the opposite)
Thanks all for the help and I'd love to hear your input on this project!
Yeah, you're talking about the Ambient Orb, right?
http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/orb/orborder.html
I'm not out to make another ambient orb. I'm out to make a unique charger for my room. But thanks for the reply anyway. It's always good to look at similar designs.
google Black Widow from AsyncLabs... it's an arduino with an ethernet chip directly on the board. Maybe that's what you are looking for, no?
Either way, if you wanna know the weather, why not making a barometer? Motorola had some really nice sensors a while back.
Thanks bubulindo, that's a good thing to look into. The issue is the router is in the basement so Ethernet does not exist on any of the floors. 
Here is a quick PM conversation I had with another member on here. It might help explain my intent.
I want to thank everyone for taking their time to participate in my threads. Lots of great ideas and points here!
Hey there, thanks for the PM.
Sorry, I thought I was being pretty clear. I still have much to learn.
It started when I was thinking about how nice it would be to have an inductive charger for my phone. Then I got to thinking, there are only two times you would really use the charger. When you're going to bed (start charging) and waking up (stop charging). There are little things that I felt would make my life a little more pleasant. Things like:
-simulated sunset using mood lighting at night that automatically initiates when the room's lights are turned off
-some kind of automatic night light for when you have to get up and pee (I hate sleeping with a night light, I hate looking for one in the dark, and I hate blinding myself with the typical yellow/white incandescent light)
-Brief afternoon weather report via mood lighting
It's not necessarily designed to travel with the phone, although the slimmer the better for aesthetics.
It's not meant to be an exercise in 100% function.
Thanks for your help
Critique of any kind is welcome, because sometimes it's easy to get lost in your idea that you get blinded by it.
Luke
You'll get better results at the forum if first decide what result you want, and then ask one question in each thread.
Questions for your project: Where can I access weather forecasts which I can use as inputs for my project?
How do I build inductive charger?
I'm confused as to why your phone and charging it comes into this. Is the Arduino going to travel with the phone? Is the phone going to be the source of the forecasts data? If so, do you know how to make it collect that? Share it with the Arduino?
Seems to me that you DO want something LIKE the Ambi-light!... nothing wrong with that! But a much more "do-able" project is a system that leaves the phone out, uses some other link to the internet for the forecasts info. You won't be able to take it with you, but even if EVENTUALLY you make the thing "piggyback" on your phone, and travel with you, START with a "tied to the ground" version.
Please transfer any bits of this you find appropriate to the forum thread
How do I send signals from
So I guess to summarize, I want the Ardunio to have access to live weather reports wirelessly. WiFi is available in the house. The Arduino should be 100% autonomous. I should be able to pick up the unit, and have it automatically work anywhere in the USA with WiFi.
Also the inductive charging is not something I'm building, I'm just going to buy a unit and hack it to fit my base.
There will be the Arduino, whatever weather updating method we decide on, 6 LEDs, light sensor, and some type of motion sensing.
So a day in the life of this charger:
-Wake up, remove phone from charger
-Afternoon weather report is displayed using mood lighting
-When no one is in the room the lights fade out
-Time for bed, phone goes back on the charger
-When the rooms lights turn off, simulate a short sunset
-If you get up in the middle of the night, bring up a mostly red nightlight (so as to not destroy night vision)
REPEAT
Hmm... I think you're taking that too literally haha. I don't mean be out in the middle of the Mojave and get WiFi. I mean work in any place that has WiFi signal.
So it looks like WiFi is going to be the answer then. I just wasn't sure if there was digital data being streamed alongside the weather band radio signals, or anything else like that.
I'm not an idiot... lol. I know how WiFi works. You're just reading too much into what I'm saying. Don't worry about it.
I have no problem hooking up the device to my computer to change wifi/location settings.
That said it would be neat if I could get location via IP address lookup services. Google Maps and my iPhone do really well at this with only WiFi available.
Services like this seem to get within 100 miles but that's not good enough.
Some method of ZIP code entry wouldn't be an issue if it came to that.
TRying to stream information about the weather... :\ I mean... unless there is some API or service available from a webserver that can give you just the data you need... it's gonna be quite hard to parse through a website to get the weather update. Even if the address for your home town is static it can still be thrown of by some changes in the website.
Again... if you want to predict the weather, and if the system is going to be stationary, having a barometer might be what you need. People still use barometers for weather forecast...
You must also remember that you're working with an 8 bit machine... iPhone is a bit more complex. Plus you don't seem to be the tech guy that understands how things work under the hood. I am not criticizing or putting you down, it's just what comes accross and although nice to have, they are not so simple to implement on such a small system.
Would you really want to control the lights based on the weather?
Simulating sunset when turning off the lights would be more of a nuisance than a plus if you ask me... plus hooking all this up isn't something easy to do safely.
How would the arduino know when turn on a light for you to go to the bathroom? A switch? You might have that already, it's a light switch. with a little discipline you don't have to find it, it'll always be where you left it after going to sleep. LOL