purpose If you’re like me, you have drawers and shelves full of products you’ve bought, used, and then put aside after you’re up to date or bored with new ones. He called them awkward tool drawers (in reference to the awkward toy island in the classic style Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer animation). Instead of letting old, unloved technology gather dust, why not create a new purpose for them.
I thought it would be a good idea to start a recurring series on using old unused technology and tools to solve everyday problems to improve life. My first post in this series was How I repurposed a flash camera to create the ultimate bird camera And now I’m back with another use for an old smartphone.
problem to solve
We had a very basic La Crosse Technology الطقس weather station On our kitchen table for years has a single LCD display that displays the current time and date as well as temperature, humidity, and forecast information from a wireless, battery-powered sensor placed outside. This little weather station started reporting very inaccurate temperature information and instead of buying a new one I decided to make one using technology I already had.
solution requirements
- A way to display real-time data from what I have Storm weather system
- Always on the backlit color screen. The old La Crosse was not backlit and it was hard to read without turning on the light in the kitchen
- There are no batteries to charge or replace in the display or sensors
Possible solutions
successful solution
- Old smartphone with Tempest Weather app
Initially I was going to use a Dakboard and Raspberry Pi solution, but I realized I wanted a very small screen so it wouldn’t take up too much space on my kitchen counter. This meant I had to buy something new, which wasn’t the point, so I gave up on that idea.
The idea of a laptop also wouldn’t have occurred since it took up too much space on the counter, so the obvious choice was an old smartphone. I decided to use my old one Pixel 2 XL Because I thought customizing an Android phone would be easier than customizing an iPhone and I didn’t have an old, unused iPhone anyway.
I pulled my Pixel out of my malfunctioning tool tray, charged it, did a factory reset, and disabled the security that requires a fingerprint or PIN to unlock the phone. Then I just installed Storm weather app for my current Tempest weather system.
To resolve the always-on requirement, I have enabled the developer options feature by going to the About phone settings screen and tapping on the build number 7 times. Once enabled, I went to system settings and developer options.
From there, I enabled the Stay Awake feature, which means the screen will never turn off. Yay! But even with this feature enabled, the screen goes dark after a while that I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep the screen at maximum brightness about the entire time.
As with most things, there is an app for that! I searched the Google Play Store for “idle screen” and found many apps, but a number of them have in-app purchases or ads. I ended up using the free app you see above called Keep the screen on Which contains a checkbox to keep the screen on. It’s simple and does what I need. I can’t guarantee that this will work with all Android phones, but it works fine on the Pixel 2 XL.
I didn’t want to put the phone on a stand, so I used some 3M Driving Strips To attach to a tile backsplash above the kitchen counter and right next to a wall socket.
When we remodeled our kitchen a few years ago, I made sure there were USB ports built into the outlets. I found a short USB-A to USB-C cable to use, but I’ll probably end up buying a shorter one to make things neater.
Future improvements and improvements
I’m thinking of using Tasker Or another app to kill and restart Tempest Weather app once per day as I find that sometimes it doesn’t update itself to show the latest data from the external sensor showing on a second screen in the Tempest app.
I would also like to be able to switch between the Tempest Weather app for my sensor and another app that shows a live view of the weather radar. Maybe I can do that with Tasker. If anyone has any ideas let me know…
Another improvement is to use a small tablet that can display split screen display and has Tempest Weather app in one window, local radar, calendar, etc. in the other window.
last thoughts
I realize that not everyone has a Tempest weather station, so this specific project won’t apply to everyone. But, as long as your phone has WiFi like most of the others, you can still use and use this idea to display any weather app.
Do you have a problem that can be solved using existing tools/technology? Let me know and I will consider writing about it in the future reuse purpose.
