Lesson Six: Show the Temperature Outside

Now we will code something really cool (or hot) - reaching out to the Internet and finding out what the temperature is outside!

Your Raspberry Pi should be able to connect to the Internet for this lesson to work correctly. If it does, when we press a button the clock should reach out to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and use the weather station closest to you to find the current temperature outside. Once your clock finds out what the temperature is, it will show it on your display for a few seconds.

First, let's construct a "Weather" object:


    from hackclock.runapp.Libs.Weather import Weather

    # The weather station
    weather_station = Weather()

We need to tell the Weather object what weather station to observe the temperature from. Each Hack Clock may be in a different location, so this is a configurable setting. When the Hack Clock software was installed on your Raspberry Pi it should have been set up with your local weather station - so we will need to fetch that "configuration" value that is special to your clock.

in order to do that, we will need to fetch the "weather_station" value from our current configuration:


    station_name = configuration.get('weather_station')

Next we can add this line to the top of our code that we already created:


    # The weather station
    station_name = configuration.get('weather_station')
    weather_station = Weather(station_name)

This should be all we need to fetch the current weather outside. Now let's print out the temperature on our display by adding a few lines to the "switchWeatherStation" function that we created in our previous lesson:


    # Show the current weather
    def switchWeatherStations():
        # Clear the display
        display.setColon(False)
        display.setEvening(False)
        display.setHours(0)
        display.setMinutes(0)

        # Show the current temperature
        current_temp = weather_station.getCurrentTemp()
        display.setMinutes(current_temp)

        # Wait for about three seconds
        clock.waitAbout(3)

Save our work and now test this out. You should see the current weather on your clock! If things do not work, test to make sure:

Your button is plugged into your Raspberry Pi correctly
Your Raspberry Pi can connect to the Internet
Your local weather station is correctly configured

Congratulations - you're the proud builder of a fully operational Hack Clock! You aren't finished yet - you can now customize the Hack Clock in whatever way you like. If you would like to see some other examples (like having a button control the music), click on the "Restore" button and load one of the examples. Don't worry too much about messing up; you can restore your previously saved code if things go completely wrong!