Weather explorer umbrella

Peter writes –

At the installation “Weather Explorer Umbrella” s user can walk with a umbrella over a big worldmap – hear, see and feel the weather of a certain place of the world. The umbrella contains a small speaker, different color-leds and a handfan. A camera-tracking recognize the position of the umbrella with a red position-light. The weather data comes from the Yahoo-Weather-Internetservice, which offers XML-Files for many cities of the world.

The umbrella is connected with 8 wires (inside 2 bigger wires) to a Arduino-Board, which controlls the leds and fan. Between the Arduino and the long wire for the motor (fan) is a motordriver-chip (l293). It controlls the speed of the handfan (speed-values are from the Yahhoo-XML-Files). A white, blue and yellow led shows the weather-light-atmosphere and where the user is at that moment. The white led is for example for a flash (thunderstorm) or for snow, the blue light for rain or wind and the yellow led for the sun.

Programming of this project was written with “Processing” and “Arduino”. For the XML-import used I the java-library “jdom”.

Experimentelle Interfaces WS 06 » Peter Woelfel – Link.