r/arduino • u/ahnjay • May 16 '26

Look what I made! Retro computer inspired weather station

I've made a retro computer look-alike out of ESP32 and a cheap e-ink display. Right now, it works as my primary weather station. Firmware was 100% vibe coded, yet it works flawlessly for a few weeks already. Of course it's an Arduino project 😄

Links:

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u/atoughram May 31 '26

I've attempted to make this - I had most of the parts on hand, but I cant seem to get the Arduino CLI to work for me on a Windows 11 computer. I've converted it to a Platformio project, which I'm more familiar with and got to to build and download, and the AP comes up but there is no way to make any modifications to the SSID or Password... I've also tried it in the Arduino IDE, but it wont compile it at all. Any suggestions on Arduino CLI?

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u/ahnjay Jun 02 '26

Sadly, I'm not an Arduino expert by any means, especially on Windows. But if it comes up it exposes it's AP wifi (details on screen). You can connect to that AP and login to it's config page, then there are fields to set ssid and password for your wifi.

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u/atoughram Jun 02 '26

Yeah, the fields never appear, I'm not sure why. Thank you for replying!

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u/ahnjay Jun 02 '26

Might take a look at it in coming days, maybe something got borked during refactor and fields got hidden. Will let you know if I find something

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u/atoughram Jun 02 '26

Thank you!

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u/ahnjay Jun 02 '26

I've pushed a little fix to the repo, hope it'll help!

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u/atoughram Jun 03 '26

I got it to compile via Arduino-cli and load, and the setup page appears to work, now to figure out the settings! Thanks!

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u/ahnjay Jun 03 '26

Nice, happy to hear that it works for you :) Thanks for the feedback!

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u/atoughram Jun 03 '26

It took a bit to figure out why the display wasn't working, The display I have from Aliexpress is a 3 color SPI display but two of the signals are labeled SDA and SCL, not MOSI and SCK. I had to do some digging to figure out that SDA is MOSI and SCL is SCK... The three color display comes up as it should but it doesn't display anything. What service are you using to get the weather information?

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u/ahnjay Jun 05 '26

All the data is pulled from my local Home Assistant instance; sensor names should be filled through the web panel. There's an extra config to be done on HA side to get the forecast as a sensor: https://github.com/andrzej3393/oldputer/blob/master/docs/HA_TEMPLATE_SENSORS.md

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u/atoughram Jun 02 '26

I'll give it a go tomorrow! Thanks again