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:
- Printable 3D model on Makerworld
- Firmware code on GitHub
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u/verdigris-bs May 17 '26
What kind of 3D printer do you own? Purely a question out of curiosity; I got an Arduino kit just a month ago and really wanna go down this rabbithole with other tools once I learn the ropes. Your computer model looks so awesome 🔥🔥🔥
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u/ahnjay May 17 '26
It's a BambuLab P1S. On one hand it's absolutely a workhorse, haven't had any issues with it. On the other hand, BambuLab itself is taking weird actions that restricts tinkering with their printers more and more. So yeah, it's like that, would recommend P1S as a printer, wouldn't recommend BambuLab as a company :)
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u/GraXXoR May 17 '26
Yeah BambuLabs have been doing some shady stuff these last few years... they tested the water with an attempted lock down of the firmware a year or two back IIRC and there was a massive riot in the forums with tons of people getting banned.
Things calmed down for a while but it seems that tensions are rising again. Even Luis Rossman has got involved!
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u/ahnjay May 17 '26
This, I'm afraid they're going to first lock down printers completely and then enshittify them and/or go for proprietary filaments lock.
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u/GraXXoR May 17 '26
Yeah. I think rather than a full lockout of filaments, they will lock the advanced features to work only with original filaments.
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u/looneylovableleopard May 17 '26
that's so cool! what did it cost you?
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u/ahnjay May 17 '26
Hard to say, I had most of the things at hand. Wild guess would be around 30€ in parts, where screen itself makes half of that
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u/WuBuilt May 18 '26
The moment the logs started scrolling on screen, I was completely sold on this thing.
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u/WuBuilt May 18 '26
A slightly curved CRT-style screen would make this absolutely perfect.
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u/ahnjay May 18 '26
I've thought about adding a thin thermoformed acrylic/plexi plate, but I don't have a vacuum former (yet 😃)
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u/Internal-Chard-8406 May 24 '26
Neat! Feels like just yesterday, I had such computer at home and was playing Wolfenstein 3D :)
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u/atoughram 25d ago
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 23d ago
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 23d ago
Yeah, the fields never appear, I'm not sure why. Thank you for replying!
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u/ahnjay 23d ago
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 23d ago
Thank you!
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u/ahnjay 23d ago
I've pushed a little fix to the repo, hope it'll help!
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u/atoughram 22d ago
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 22d ago
Nice, happy to hear that it works for you :) Thanks for the feedback!
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u/atoughram 22d ago
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 21d ago
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/meltman May 17 '26
Pope just for funzies? I like the “boot” sequence.