Wifi-Enabled Weather Display with LED's

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello!
So, it's coming up on my 5th anniversary and as some of you may know, that's the wood anniversary (insert obligatory sexual joke here). So, for my anniversary I want to build my wife a weather/clock display that can be mounted in our bathroom so that in the morning when she's getting dressed her can check the local weather easily. Here's what I've got so far:

Component List:

  1. Nokia 5110 (3.3V)
  2. ESP8266 (3.3V)
  3. 6-20 Multicolored PL9823 LED’s (5V)
  4. 10k Potentiometer
  5. ATmega328P (5V)
  6. Motion Sensor(Need recommendation)

Project Short Description:
I want to build a motion activated weather display with some LED’s to make it pretty for the wifey. The display and the wifi module are obvious, but the potentiometer will allow the wife to change the color of the LED’s by scrolling through some options. The motion sensor should allow the whole thing to sleep until it senses motion. The ESP8266 will pull down the weather information from yahooapis whenever it senses motion and will be displayed on the Nokia 5110.

Project Issues:

  1. What motion sensor fits this purpose?
    a. I’m opening to purchasing anything within reason as long as it’s pretty small and low power. Its sensing distance only needs to be 6-12 inches. Much like the paper towel dispenser.
  2. Power
    a. I don’t know how to best power this device. I’d prefer something rechargeable like a couple 18650 cells, but I’m not sure where to find good cells and how to wire them up to charge. I’ve found a lot of charging circuits, but I’m not sure how exactly to configure the power for the bare processor. I had planned to use just the base processor on a board, but I’ve heard of the Pro Mini which might be better suited to my purpose. I’m guessing that if I use one 18650 I’ll need a boost converter to get the voltage that the ATmega328P requires? Also do any of you have resources on how to reduce power usage during the low/sleep power time?

Thanks for all your help!

2

No one has any ideas or resources I could check out?

3

I can help you with some part for this.

To begin with, connect an ESP8266 with your arduino. That is the most challenging part. I used an ESP8266-01 version.
Be careful to use the 3.3V supply. The sourcing of the 3.3V arduino pin is not sufficient for this. I used a power supply i had designed for one of my personal project.

Once the connections are done fine, start to check if the AT commands are working properly. I faced a lot of time for this. 8266 was able to get into ready state, but was not accepting anything from the arduino. Mainly because of poor documentation of the 8266 chip.

Once this is done, we can go ahead. Msg after you are done with this part. I am answering so as to not overwhelm you with work :slight_smile:

Cheers.