Having finished the Currency Thing discord cryptocurrency, I wanted to keep the bot rolling and start another big bot project, but I wasn’t sure what to make next. I asked my friends what they’d like to see, and they mentioned that a weather bot would be useful. David Lynch’s Weather Report on youtube came to mind, and instantly everything clicked.

I started out by finding an API from which to get the data. I found wttr.in, and originally I just CURLed that website directly since it displayed all the data and had a cool ASCII graphic. That was done very fast and easily, but I knew I wanted more from this bot.

I wasn’t happy with the ASCII graphics and so I wanted to create my own pretty weather card instead. I had experience doing image manipulation in Python from the Stockman bot, and I hadn’t used Illustrator in a while, so that’s what I started working on. I began by looking at the WWO weather condition codes and making a simple and fun icon for each general condition (sunny, cloudy, raining, foggy), then combinbing or expanding them to create the more specific conditions (partly cloudy, heavy rain, thundery rain).

Having done the icons, I brainstormed a bunch of concepts for current weather reports, 1-day forecasts, and weekly forecasts. It took a few tries to figure out what I wanted, and you can look at all the concepts in the showcase above. The final thing to do was creating the Python script to load the correct icons and lay out the images like I designed them using Pillow, based on the API data fetched from WeatherAPI.com.

All the icons, design, and programming were done by me.