Displaying the Weather Like in a Wellsian Fantasy

Steampunk fiction, style, and culture may be well past its prime, but it is still pretty cool. The “steam” part isn’t the real point anyway and the true appeal is the retrofuturistic imagining of an alternate history in which the Victorian era never ended and the digital era never began. It is also fun to make things with lots of brass, wood, and cogs. Redditor _freaked_ certainly believes so, because they built this beautiful and functional steampunk weather display.

While we see lots of weather station and weather display projects around here, few of them would look appropriate in a Victorian home. Because it is a sensible approach, they almost all utilize modern digital screens and the anachronism would feel overwhelming. This design, on the other hand, has the kind of style that we’d expect to see on the set of a film adaptation of a Jules Verne novel. There is rich wood, bright copper, oxidized brass, a nifty valve-like switch, a pair of rotating indicators, and even a good ol’ fashioned incandescent light bulb.

Behind that Wellsian facade is a much more mundane set of electronic components. The most important is an ESP32 development board that talks to the OpenWeatherMap API to retrieve the upcoming weather forecast for the area. The ESP32 connects to the other components through a breakout board.

This display has two gauges: one that indicates the temperature and one that indicates the weather conditions (rainy, sunny, stormy, etc.). Eagle-eyed Kingdom Hearts fans will notice something interesting about those gauges. A three-position switch lets the user alternate between display the current day’s weather, the next day’s weather, or the following day’s weather. The incandescent lightbulb (funny that those are “old timey” now) comes on when the user makes a new request. They can tap the copper pipe with a finger to turn it back off.

The ESP32 moves the two gauges needles using small pancake stepper motors, with Hall effect sensors and magnets to help with homing. The incandescent bulb receives mains power through a relay module. The switch is actually just a potentiometer and a single wire connected to the copper pipe allows for capacitive touch sensing.

We can’t promise that this project will usher in a steampunk renaissance, but it should appeal to those who still have a fondness for the steampunk aesthetic.