Tokymaker weather connected Cloud
TokyCloud is a beautiful, artistic and useful project to visualize the weather condition. It also has a connection to Windows AI Cortana, so you can use voice command to control it too.
It is perfect to be hanged in your living room, or in your bedroom. And I am sure will captivate the attention of all your friends and family.
Description
This is one of the projects that captivated most attention from the Toky Community. It is not hard to build and to code, but the result is impressive!
Furthermore, it leaves room for improvement, and more complete projects.The code can get as complex as you want, adding more functionalities, but here we are posting the basic one. The main features are:
Lights up a Sun when the weather forecast calls for clear on your location
Electric lightening flashes and blue drops fall down when the weather forecast calls for storm on your location
Lights up a moon 15 minutes before the sunset on your location.
The cloud shows off all it’s colours when party mode is on.
The Cloud lights up a couple of stars and a quarter of the moon just at sunset.
Can turn on any of the states by calling them using Cortana voice command
Materials & Tools
Learn to code your own prototypes using the simple visual coding interface and just one finger and program it without installing software or connecting cables. Understand the principles of operating system electronics connecting in the most intuitive way, a large variety of sensors and actuators.
LED light
Also Neopixel LED, but diferent format. LED is also known as light-emitting diode is a light source that is able to adjust its luminance and color.
LED Strip
It is a strip of 30 Neopixel LED. Very common and easy to acquire on internet.
It is a 8×8 Matrix of LED, also Neopixel. With this format, we can create shapes, icons and small drawings.
rope or string
You know, just a rope. But get a thin one.
cotton
Cotton will create the cloud-alike shape. Try to use big pieces.
An adhesive substance used to stick things together. You can use hot glue as well.
Pencil
A writing utensil usually consisting of graphite encased in wood. Due to its cylindrical shape, pencils can also act as a great axle or shaft.
Box Cutter
Also known as a retractable blade knife is a great tool to cut cardboard or paperboard.
Assembly Instructions
Step 1: inflate a baloon, wrap the rope and glue it. You can use hot glue or wood glue with water.
Step 2: remove the balloon
If you are using wood glue, I am afraid you will need to wait 24h to let it dry, or to use a hair dryer. After it is removed, cut out the extra ropes to have just the minimum amount of structure to sustain the cotton (see next image)
Step 3: Add the lights
The connections are:
64xLED MATRIX: OUT1
8xLED: OUT 2, 3 and 4
30xLED Strip: OUT 5
Of course, you could connect all the lights to the same Output and work on a bit more complex code, but since I don’t need to connect anything else, I went for the easy lazy solution 🙂
Step 4: Add the Tokymaker
Glue the back part of the Tokymaker to the rope.
Connect the usb and use the cable as hanger (you will need to have a USB port in the ceiling)
Step 5: Glue the cotton
First, check that the 8x LED are glued at the bottom of the cloud.
Now, cover the cloud with a very thin layer of cotton. Just to hide the inside structure and cables.
Use hot glue to do it, and be careful not to burn your hands.
Step 6: Add a second layer of cotton to create a more beautiful shape.
The next layers are aesthetics. Create voluminous shapes and glue them. Be careful, the more cotton you use, the less light will go through.
Now let’s connect the Tokymaker to Bluetooth and work on the code!
If you don’t know how to connect the Tokymaker, go to https://academy.tokylabs.com
Code
This is an IoT project, so there is a code for the hardware and a code for the internet services.
The code for the hardware is done at create.tokylabs.com or create.tokylabs.cn
The code for the internet services are done at io.adafruit.com and www.ifttt.com
Please check https://academy.tokylabs.com if you never did an IoT project before
Create.tokylabs.com or Create.tokylabs.cn
You can see the code here:
io.adafruit.com
Create feed
You will need to create the feed “weather” to store a number that will change from 0 to 3 depending on the command or status you want to execute.
www.ifttt.com
Create the applets
In Ifttt we will use cortana voice commands API and weather API to do all we need.
In the picture you can see how it is sending a number to my “weather” feed in adafruit depending on the voice command I say, and the actual weather.
It is fairly simple, but again, if you never did that before, go to https://academy.tokylabs.com and start over there.
Purchase different sensors and accessories in the shop to help make your project a success!
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