Simple hack for creating a cute weather notification cloud using Home Assistant's Dark Sky Sensor and MQTT
- Addressable WS2812b LED Strip
- ESP8266 NodeMCU Board
- Cloud Message Board, also available at the Flying Tiger store as of October 2019
- Micro USB cord
- HomeAssistant installation with DarkSky Sensor and MQTT
- You'll need to do a little bit of soldering to connect the lights to the board, so you should have what you need to do that too
- Load the weathercloud.ino onto the NodeMCU with Arduino
- Add the attached bits to your light.yaml and automation.yaml files in HomeAssistant
You may not need the extra ground connection, but if you experience flickering or non-lighting LEDs towards the end, this will probably fix it. I used a string of 16 LEDs in 4 sections and wired it as shown.
You'll need to carefully open the lightbox. Depending on wich type you have you may have to pry it open with a knife or plastic spudger, or just find the screws that hold it together. Take out the existing LEDs which are probably just sticky taped to the back or sides (these are just white and won't work for this project, save them for something else). It may also have a battery connection and a switch, which I just removed.
Once you have an empty box you can just stick your LEDs and NodeMCU in there and run the USB cord through where the switch used to be. You may have to experiment with placement so you dont get weird shadows from the wiring.
Add the bits of code to your automation.yaml and light.yaml files, and edit as you see fit. Here are some of the presets I came up with, the rest is up to you!
