I have been thinking and tinkering around creating a home weather calendar. The background is that we have a variety of hand-held devices such as mobile phones, PCs and tablets as well as a reasonable in-house network, both wired and wireless.  I’ve also a number of local sensors such as weather stations and temperature sensors, and some level of automation with programmable lighting. I’d like to create a weather calendar to display the local weather forecast, plus upcoming calendar entries from our joint shared Google calendars.

Some simple requirements:

1. High contrast display that can run from battery – LCD or e-ink.
2. Low-powered system that can run a long time from a battery.
3. Wifi connected so that I can work on it remotely.
4. Preferably coded in Python as I am happiest working in that language.
5. Preferably all local to the display.

To do this I am going to assemble some components:

• e-ink displays
• Embedded systems
• Single-board computers

… of which I have a couple of e-ink displays (Pervasive Displays and Waveshare models), a handful of embedded systems (Pyboard, Photon, Feather Huzzah, WiPy) and any number of SBCs (Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black, Odroid, Arduino).

I rejected powering this off a SBC like the Raspberry Pi as the power requirements for those are bad as even the Pi Zero will only run for less than a day with AA batteries! The vast differences between those chips that run a full Linux stack versus the embedded world that have negligible power draw on sleep mode. In addition a lot of those embedded systems are wifi-connected, and wifi itself is power hungry and needs careful sleep modes.