A daily briefing for a passive info display. The housing is a gutted Hanimex Vista Viewer II — a 1970s analog 35mm slide viewer. The LCD sits where the film slide used to go. You look into it and it tells you something about the world.
// Weather module — Open Weather API · Orange ASCII on black · Hanimex Vista Viewer II housing
Hardware
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
Waveshare 2 Inch LCD Module
KY-040 Rotary Encoder
Mounted inside the gutted body of a Hanimex Vista Viewer II. The LCD occupies exactly the space where the 35mm slide would have sat.
// Internal assembly — Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W · Waveshare 2in LCD · KY-040 rotary encoder
Software
The program runs as a slideshow — rendered in orange ASCII on a black background. The rotary encoder cycles through slides. Each slide is a module pulling from a different data source:
Weather — current conditions via Open Weather API
Climate — longer-range climate data
Nature — species observations via iNaturalist
Near-Earth Objects — asteroid proximity data from NASA
Space Weather — solar activity and geomagnetic conditions
Meditation — rotating quotes
Full source and setup instructions on GitHub. Free API keys from Open Weather and NASA are all you need to run it.
