Configuration | Running | i3status | Shell Prompt

Wunderbar is a "widget" for i3bar/i3status (or any text based display like prompts or conky).

Wunderbar prints a concise display of current and forecasted weather.

Cl48/W3 | Cl48 MC45 MC44 MC45 | MC4357 CR5054 CR4054 CR4055 ...
^^^^^^^   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
present       next 12 hrs               next 7 days

The above tells me I may not be spending much time outside for the next several days. More specifically, the present condition is "Cloudy, 48 degrees, a little wind. The next hours (4 indicators, 3 hours apart) and days will be "Mostly Cloudy" with "Chances of Rain". See the source (conds table) for a little more detail on the weather conditions mnemonics.

Configure Wunderground and Wunderbar

Before running you have to do some minimal configuration.

API key (required)

Get your own free Wunderground API key by signing up. Quick and easy (beware the auto-play audio ads!). You might need to visit the API to find your key. Tell Wunderbar about your key (and other things) by exporting environment variables in your shell:

% export WUNDERKEY=abc123  # but use your own!

Set location (required to be useful)

Find your approximate location at wunderground.com by searching. Then click Change Station to get more specific about your nearest personal weather station (PWS). Alternatively, you can just use your zip code (or regional equivalent). An example for Beaverton, OR, USA is:

% export WUNDERLOC=KORBEAVE74  # a pws near me
OR
% export WUNDERLOC=97005

Temperature units (recommended)

Set your temperature units for Fahrenheit (f (default)) or Celsius (c).

% export WUNDERUNITS=f

Personal Weather Station display (optional)

You might want to display your PWS ID if you move around much.

% export WUNDERSHOWLOC=yes

Font-awesome icons (optional)

It's pretty neat to see weather icons instead of little text abbreviations. If you want the icons in your bar, see this i3 config page.

Basically, you need to install font-awesome on your system (place the .otf in ~/.fonts). Or, on Fedora you can just dnf install fontawesome-fonts.

Then put this into your ~/.i3/config (and see further config for i3status below):

bar {
  ...
  font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, Awesome 8
}

The font-awesome icons weren't designed for weather, but there are approximations that convey the conditions quite well (though "Clear skies" is just a smiley face since "Sunny" is apparently different and takes the sun icon). There's a prefix of c ("chance of"), m ("mostly"), and p ("partly") for each icon when appropriate.

Icons are now the default. If you want to go with plain text (and not have to install font-awesome):

% export WUNDERJUSTTEXT=yes

Run it

Option 1: source-clone and build (harder)

Clone this repo.

Ensure Leiningen is installed.

Build a runnable uberjar (generate something like target/wunder-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar):

% lein uberjar

Option 2: simply download (easy)

Download a runnable jar file.

Run continuously

Put Weatherbar into your crontab to run every half-hour.

% crontab -e
...
*/30 * * * *    WUNDERKEY=123... WUNDERLOC=456... java -jar /path/to/wunder-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar

On each run, a temporary file, /tmp/wunderbar.txt, is created/replaced, holding the one-line text of the current run.

While testing, be careful about making runs in quick succession. The API's free plan wants to limit you to 10 calls/minute, and each Wunderbar run costs you 3 calls.

If you want to see logging output:

% export WUNDERDEBUG=yes

It should be enough to update (run) every 15 or 30 minutes. Although it may be slow to run (a second or two), the status bar itself will be very quick to update (e.g., you may update your actual bar every second or few) since it's only reading a temporary file — not calling anything.

Add to i3status

Modify your ~/.i3/config to call a custom my-i3status command (as described here.

bar {
  ...
  status_command my-i3status
}

Then your my-i3status script is something like:

i3status --config ~/.i3status.conf | while :
do
  read line
  weather=$(cat /tmp/wunderbar.txt)
  echo "$weather | $line" || exit 1
done

As a shell prompt

Instead of printing the whole long line, you could just cut present conditions (Cl48/W3) and put it into your shell prompt. Here's all you need for a simple Zsh prompt:

% PROMPT='$(cut -f1 -d" " /tmp/wunderbar.txt) %F{red}%n%f@%F{blue}%m%f %F{yellow}%1~%f %# '
Cl50/W0 mde@arix ~ %

Improvement ideas

I couldn't figure out how to get color working, but that would be awesome if someone knows how to feed this through i3status as json with markup. Highs in red, lows in blue, a few other colors would make it more quickly readable.

A lunch-time weather report could be spoken to you. Would be fun to parse the concise data generated by Wunderbar into a mini weather report.

Might be worth adding wind reporting if you live in a windy city. It's already captured, but I don't display it for brevity's sake.

Precipitation might be nice, but if the condition is "Rain" then I don't see a huge benefit to a "100% precipitation" indicator. Other percentages may be useful.

You could have a randomly rotating weather status showing all the places you'd rather be, like Hawaiʻi.

Could auto-detect location based on IP, etc, and find nearby PWS.

Prior work

This project started out as a Zsh script using OpenWeatherMap. I found Wunderground to be a more reliable and accurate service and wanted to rewrite it in Clojure to be more robust. So this builds on some things learned from Weatherbar. This version is missing OWM's sunup/sundown time feature, which was kinda' nice.

License

Copyright © 2017 Micah Elliott

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.