Finally built the weather display my family kept asking me for

Oct 09, 2026 Last reply: 12 hours ago 3 Replies
Jump to replies (3)

Spent the last couple weekends on a little e-paper weather frame for the living room and it's finally up on the wall. It shows the week ahead with icons, highs and lows, and how much rain to expect each day. Today gets highlighted so nobody has to squint at it, and the temp graph stretches itself to fit whatever the range is that week.



It pulls data from our home automation server every 30 minutes, which gets it from a free local forecast feed. The refresh is slow enough that you can watch it blink if you time it right, which the kids find hilarious for some reason. Honest reason I built it: I was tired of being the household weather app. Now they just glance at the shelf. It also satisfied that itch of wanting to see if I could actualy pull it off.



The layout is a bit snug still, the graph crowds the rain numbers on busy days. Next step is nudging things around pixel by pixel untill it breathes properly. Maybe add a moon phase if I get bored.


Mine lives in the kitchen and does basially the same job, pulling the forecast every half hour onto a little waveshare panel. The pixel nudging part is real. I spent a whole evening moving the high temp column two pixels at a time until it stopped clipping on days with three digits of rain chance. What finally worked for me was printing the layout on paper first and drawing where the text actually landed, then copying those numbers into the code. Saved me about five more nights of guessing.

One thing I learned the hard way with e-paper: if you do partial refreshes between full cycles you get ghosting that builds up over a week or so. I just force a full clean refresh overnight when nobody is around to watch it flash, and the panel has stayed crisp since. The slow blink during updates never got old for my daughter either, she used to camp by the counter waiting for it. The moon phase is a fun addition if you go for it. I added sunrise and sunset times instead and honestly those get checked more than anything else on the whole display. Nice build, the household weather app retirement is a worthy goal.

I ended up dropping the graph entirely on mine. Spent two weekends trying to make seven days fit on a 4.2 inch panel and the lines always turned to mush whenever the week had one warm day next to a cold snap. Now it just shows three days ahead, big text, and honestly nobody in the house has complained once. The week-long version looked impressive but the three-day one gets actually read. One thing I'd suggest early rather than late: figure out your update schedule around daylight. Mine used to refresh on a fixed timer and it always seemed to blink right when we had guests over, which got old fast. I moved it to pull at set times like 7am and 6pm and it feels less like a screensaver and more like a framed thing. Also the rain numbers were the first thing to go on mine. A little umbrella icon with a drippy corner tells my kids everything they need to know about taking a jacket, and it freed up a whole column of space. The moon phase idea is fun though. I stuck one on a nightlight project last year and it was weirdly satisfying to get right, only took a handful of lines of code for the eight phases.

Agree with the guy who cut his down to three days, same thing happened here. I went from seven days to four and the display finally gets looked at instead of squinted at. My one addition was sticking a cheap sensor next to the panel for indoor temp and humidity, and honestly that little line gets checked more than the forecast does. Guests always ask about it too, so maybe worth a slot if you ever redo the layout.

Join the Discussion

Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.

Didn't find your answer?

Ask the community — no account required